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TWENTIETH CENTURY TEXT-BOOKS 

EDITED BY 

A. F. NIGHTINGALE, Ph. D. 

SUPERINTENDENT OF HIGH SCHOOLS, CHICAGO 
AND 

CHARLES H. THURBER, A. M. 

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TWENTIETH CENTURY TEXT-BOOKS 



/ 

MACAULAY'S ESSAYS 

ON 

MILTON AND ADDISON 



EDITED 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY 

GEORGE B. AITON, M. A. 

INSPECTOR OF HIGH SCHOOLS, STATE OF MINNESOTA 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 






47646 

Copyright, 1899, 



By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 



N0Vi6iSi3 1 

SECOND COPY, 



I 






PREFATORY NOTE. 



This edition of Macaulay's essays on Addison and 
Milton has been prepared with . special reference to 
its use in secondary schools. No attempt has been 
made to supplant the use of dictionary, cyclopaedia of 
names, atlas, and historical reference works by over- 
loading the text with cumbersome notes. A few proper 
names are given a setting ; for others the student must 
consult his authorities; and others yet he must learn 
to pass over as not essential to the essayist's meaning. 

A number of quotations are given, not only to 
strengthen or to temper Macaulay's thought, but also 
in the hope of interesting students in the literary criti- 
cism of the present half century. 

An understanding of English political history is 
prerequisite to an understanding of the two essays, 
which might not inappropriately be called political 
tractates. A chronological table is given, by means 
of which the student may arrange in proper sequence 
Macaulay's numerous allusions to political events. 



vi PREFATORY NOTE. 

The list of reference works is not extended to cover 
all the material available, but is cut down to the lowest 
limit, and may be regarded as a personal recommenda- 
tion of books which should be in a school library. 

G. B. A. 



INTEODUCTION. 



Macaulay^s standing in the world of letters was 
secure when he was twenty-five years of age. The main 
facts of his early and after life are readily set in order. 
One step follows another as naturally and as easily as 
the heir apparent succeeds his father on the throne, 
and in turn is followed by his own son. Genius is pro- 
verbially waited upon by a tardy paymaster, but Ma- 
caulay had an immediate reward of the most substan- 
tial and appreciable kind. Few men have achieved 
success in more directions, or on easier terms. He rose 
to eminence as a statesman and a man of letters; he 
became a person of wealth and an ornament of society ; 
he was made a member of the British peerage ; his life 
was crowded with useful service, and his career was 
full of honor: but Macaulay's biography i« devoid of 
crisis, and is, in a way, uneventful. Macaulay is far 
less interesting, therefore, than Milton; less interest- 
ing, perhaps through a shorter lapse of time, than Ad- 
dison ; and certainly much less interesting than his own 
writings. Yet it would not be fair to say that the life 
of one who bore so conspicuous and honorable a part 
in British affairs is uninteresting. It would be unjust 
to say that a writer who has illuminated so many lit- 
erary characters, and rendered literature attractive to 
young readers, is simply a superior sort of Boswell, 
holding to British letters somewhat the same relation 



yiii INTEODUCTION. 

that Boswell held to a single man^ in whose personality 
we have little concern. It were unjust to the memory 
of a British gentleman, a gentleman in the best sense 
of the word, to belittle in any way the character or the 
signal service of Macaulay; but his life is so uniformly 
a series of prolonged successes in literature, in politics, 
in society, and in financial matters, so uninterrupted a 
"cascade of fallings on his feet,'' and so devoid of grap- 
plings with untoward circumstance, that to those who 
naturally rejoice in a hard and well-fought battle, the 
tougher the better, in which merit eventually comes 
out successful, or grimly goes down without thought 
of surrender, his life seems to lack an important ele- 
ment of interest. 

The Maeaulays, as the name indicates, were High- 
landers.- Great - grandfather Aulay Macaulay and 
Grandfather John Macaulay were parish ministers 
with their full share of tribulation, blessed with very 
moderate circumstances, amid which they reared large 
families of from twelve to fourteen vigorous children. 
They appear to have been men of intelligence, readers 
and writers, from whom Macaulay inherited the char- 
acteristics which have distinguished him. Trevelyan 
gives us an interesting note in his Life. " Mr. Carlyle 
caught sight of Macaulay's face in unwonted repose, 
as he was turning the pages of a book. ' I noticed,' 
said he, ' the homely ^N'orse features that you find 
everywhere in the Western Isles, and I thought to my- 
self, Well ! any one can see that you are an honest good 
sort of a fellow made out of oatmeal.' " 

Zachary, father of Lord Macaulay, went out to 
Jamaica as a bookkeeper on an estate owned by a Glas- 
gow business firm, but being profoundly impressed by 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

the evils of negro slavery as witnessed on the Jamaica 
plantations he refused liberal offers of further employ- 
ment, and returned home at twenty-four, to throw 
himself into the movement for the abolition of slavery 
in the British colonies. 

The famous essayist, Thomas Babington Macau- 
lay, was the eldest son of this lifelong anti-slavery 
worker, and was born at Kothley Temple, a comfort- 
able country mansion in Leicestershire, midway be- 
tween York and London. His boyhood was passed at 
Clapham, a pleasant suburban district of London. His 
biographer has given us an interesting account of a pre- 
cocious childhood. The boy was a great reader and 
an inveterate talker, wise beyond his years. When but 
four years old he was visiting at the house of a friend, 
and a servant had the misfortune to spill some hot 
coffee over the boy's legs. His hostess was, of course, 
mortified and compassionate, and after a few moments 
asked him how he was feeling, when " the little fellow 
looked up in her face and replied, ' Thank you, madam, 
the agony is abated.' " 

When a mere child he was sent to an excellent 
grammar school, and made extraordinary progress. At 
seven he wrote an epitome of general history, still pre- 
served in his " boyish scrawl,'' in which he passes sage 
judgment upon various worthies, including Cromwell, 
who " was an unjust and wicked man." At twelve 
Macaulay was sent away from home, where his remark- 
able talent had been developed but never praised, to a 
fitting school, and in 1818 he entered Trinity College, 
Cambridge, where he distinguished himself as an om- 
nivorous reader, a surpassing talker, and an ardent 
partisan in national politics. He won two prizes for 



X INTRODUCTION. 

excellence in English verse, but had an aversion to 
Latin composition. He won a prize for an essay on 
The Conduct and Character of William the Third, but 
detested mathematics. 

In 1824 Macaulay received his master's degree, and 
was made a fellow of Trinity, with a pecuniary per- 
quisite, it would appear, of some £300 per annum. 
Two years later he was admitted to the bar, but beyond 
the able prosecution of a libel case for his father 
against an obnoxious editor he never followed up his 
profession seriously. 

Zachary Macaulay's home was an anti-slavery 
center, and young Macaulay had been under the influ- 
ence of these earnest reformers from childhood. When 
he returned from Cambridge to his father's home, it 
is natural that they should have sought to enlist his 
ready tongue and able pen. He had a comfortable in- 
come from his fellowship; he disliked the law, or at 
least disliked the drudgery necessary to work up a prac- 
tice. He was fond of debate, fond of politics, obliging 
in disposition, and warm in his sympathies. So it is 
little wonder that he was drawn into the spirited con- 
troversy of the times. In 1824 he distinguished him- 
self by an eloquent address before the Anti- Slavery 
Society. He won some reputation as a writer for 
Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and was eagerly hailed 
by the Whig party as a valuable accession to their 
ranks. 

About this time, Jeffrey, the editor of the Edin- 
burgh Eeview, a violent Whig, zealous for the rising 
interests of that party, wrote to a friend in London: 
" Can you not lay your hands on some clever young 
man who can write for us? The original supporters 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

of the work are getting old, and are either too busy or 
too stupid; and here (Edinburgh) the young men are 
mostly Tories." Macaulay was suggested, and his first 
contribution, Milton, appeared in the Eeview for Au- 
gust, 1825. Macaulay's reputation was made. The 
Whigs were delighted. Jeffrey wrote : " The more I 
think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that 
style.'^ Social invitations poured in, the mistress of 
Holland House took him up, and in the phrase of the 
day Macaulay woke one morning to find himself 
famous. This connection with the Edinburgh Eeview, 
once formed, lasted for eighteen years, and was never 
formally sundered. Milton, his first effort, though 
afterward pronounced by himself faulty and overloaded 
with ornament, is considered his ablest essay. Curi- 
ously enough. The Life and Writings of Addison, al- 
most his last contribution, is usually regarded as the 
next in rank. In these papers, prepared amid other 
duties at the rate of from one to three a year, there 
is necessarily inequality of merit, but none are slovenly. 
His review of BoswelFs Life of Johnson is noted. A 
few sentences from a famous paragraph found in his 
essay on Kanke's History of the Popes give an idea of 
the vigor to be found in his historical reviews, and also 
illustrate the largeness of Macaulay's views and his 
freedom from bigotry. " There is not, and there never 
was on this earth, a work of human policy so well de- 
serving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. 
The history of that church joins together the two great 
ages of human civilization. No other institution is left 
standing which carries the mind back to the times when 
the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and 
when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian 



xii INTRODUCTION. 

amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of 
yesterday when compared with the line of the supreme 
pontiffs. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that 
the term of her long dominion is approaching. She 
saw the commencement of all the governments and of 
all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in 
the world; and we feel no assurance ^that she is not 
destined to see the end of them all. She was great 
and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, 
before the Frank had passed the Ehine, when Grecian 
eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were 
still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may 
still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller 
from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast soli- 
tude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge 
to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.^^ Warren Hastings is 
perhaps his most celebrated historical essay. That on 
Madame D'Arblay is one of the least valuable. Madame 
D'Arblay was a woman who wrote Evelina, a society 
novel, while the nation was losing a continent by the 
American Eevolution, who laced the stays and dressed 
the hair of the vulgar queen of an ignorant king 
for five years, and who finally married a French 
officer. She owes her reputation chiefly to the fact 
that she was made the subject of an essay by the 
most popular of modern essayists, whose genius forged 
this cheap material into a paper interesting to the 
Holland House social circle, rather than to a literary 
posterity. 

In 1830, Macaulay was given a seat in Parliament 
as a member for Calne, a pocket borough. He immedi- 
ately became an advocate of the bill to give Jews the 
right of holding office, and in 1832 he eloquently pro- 



INTRODUCTION. xiii 

moted the famous Reform Bill, the principal object 
of which, it will be remembered, was the abolition of 
"rotten boroughs," one of which he had the honor 
to represent, and the recognition of populous districts, 
and, particularly, prosperous manufacturing centers 
which had recently grown up. 

The next year, to the unspeakable joy of his vener- 
able father, Macaulay took a prominent part in procur- 
ing the passage of a bill abolishing slavery in the Brit- 
ish colonies. Macaulay was now a member of the 
Board of Control, which represented the Crown in its 
dealings with the East Indian directors. He actively 
identified himself with measures of administrative re- 
form. In 1834 he was appointed a member of the Su- 
preme Council of India, for which country he sailed at 
once. His salary was £10,000 per annum — not an ex- 
orbitant sum when the need of having an honest man 
of ability is taken into consideration. His previous 
legal training was of service in discharging the func- 
tions of this new post. Among his other labors, he was 
appointed president of the Law Commission, which 
framed a criminal code for India. In 1838 Macaulay 
returned to England, and, after a year spent in travel 
on the continent, he was returned to Parliament 
for Edinburgh, which he continued to represent al- 
most continuously, and it is unnecessary to say with 
great ability, until his retirement from politics in 
1856. 

Seventeen years are filled to a moment with parlia- 
mentary proceedings, in discharging the duties of cabi- 
net positions, with social dinners, travel, essay writing, 
university honors, and correspondence ; yet in the midst 
of it all he managed somehow to write his History of 



xiv INTRODUCTION. 

England, the most popular and brilliant sketch of a 
historical period that has yet appeared in print. The 
first volume appeared in 1848, and other volumes 
in rapid succession. Messrs. Longmans, his fortunate 
publishers, gave him an early check for £20,000, a bit 
of paper which has become historic in the annals of 
literature. 

Toward the close of his life Macaulay withdrew 
from society, and, with the exception of an annual 
autumnal tour in France, Switzerland, or Italy, he 
enjoyed his friends and his books in a delightful home, 
chiefly library and garden, to which he retired for 
genuine comfort in his later days. In 1857 the Queen 
was pleased, at the suggestion of Prime Minister Pal- 
merston, to make him a member of the British House 
of Lords, with the title of Baron Macaulay of Eothley, 
the place of his birth. Macaulay was much pleased 
with this honor, but took no part in the proceedings 
of the Upper House. In fact, his health now began to 
decline. He was unable to carry forward his history 
to the point originally intended. One winter evening 
late in 1859 he died in an armchair in the midst of his 
books, and a few days later his remains were borne by 
the great men of Britain from that same Jerusalem 
Chamber, in which Addison lay in state, to the Poets' 
Corner of Westminster Abbey. His life was one of 
singular probity and fidelity to principle. His last 
signature was affixed to a check for £25, sent to a poor 
but deserving curate. 

A sketch of Lord Macaulay would be incomplete 
without mention of his poems. Macaulay had a lit- 
erary theory of " restoring to poetry the legends of 
which poetry had been robbed by history." He had 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

been a versifier from childhood. In 1842 he published 
his Lays of Ancient Kome, which met with immediate 
popularity. Few schoolboys are unfamiliar with Ho- 
ratius at the Bridge, or Ivry, at least, and here we have 
the verdict of the critics, by no means final, that his 
poems are well enough for schoolboys, but not worthy 
of high place. 

Macaulay's Style. 

As Jefl^rey intimated, Macaulay's style is his own. 
It could not be described to one who has not read him. 
He has had a host of followers, but had no predecessor, 
and he was well aware of his own characteristics: " A 
new member of the Review. There is an article which 
is a mocking-bird imitation of me. Somehow or other, 
the mimic cannot catch the note, but many people 
would not be able to distinguish. But I am a very un- 
safe model. My manner is, I think, and the world 
thinks, on the whole, a good one; but it is very near 
to a bad manner indeed, and those characteristics of 
my style which are most easily copied are the most 
questionable." In the use of words Macaulay is ever 
felicitous ; but he makes no effort to recover words out 
of date, to condense a chapter into a burning epithet, 
as Carlyle did, or to invent new terms, after the fashion 
of the minor writers of to-day. His vocabulary is a 
model of propriety and good usage. 

Macaulay has several ways of assisting the reader 
to carry his thought. One habit is that of pairing off 
words in such a manner that they fasten themselves 
like burs. Thus, in his paper on Lord Nugent's Me- 
morials of Hampden he accounts for a change of sym- 
pathies and a falling off of votes, which left the Puri- 



xvi INTHODUCTIOK 

tan leaders of the Long Parliament in great danger 
immediately after their first drastic efforts by saying : 
" The English are always inclined to side with the 
weak party which is in the wrong, rather than with the 
strong party which is in the right. This may be seen 
in all contests, from contests of boxers to contests of 
faction/' Here we have weak party and wrong placed 
in antithesis with strong party and right in a manner 
to make the expression cling to the reader. This par- 
ticular feature of Macaulay's style, not entirely original 
with him, has been employed so frequently since that 
it is somewhat in disrepute. Lowell, speaking of Pope, 
says : " I think one gets a little tired of the invariable 
this set off by the inevitable that, and wishes an- 
tithesis would let him have a little quiet now and then." 
Other features of Macaulay's style are the balanced 
sentence, in which he is confessedly a master, the use 
of the period and of climax^ illustrations of which may 
be readily found in the essays which follow. 

Macaulay is never hurried. He is the well-bred 
man of society, whose position as a speaker is secure. 
He chooses his topic with dignity and takes ample 
time to do his subject justice. There is no trace of 
nervousness. He never seems afraid of wearying and 
gives no weariness. Indeed, it is surprising that one 
who spoke and wrote so often never seems to lose heart 
in his subject. Another reason why Macaulay holds 
the reader's attention is that he is tremendously in 
earnest. An anecdote is afloat to the effect that a 
young wit hit off this element of Macaulay's character 
by wishing he might be as cocksure of some one fact as 
Macaulay was of everything. 

Finally, his style is a model of clearness. We are 



INTRODUCTION. xvii 

not left in doubt for a moment as to what the essayist 
means to say. This was his pride. Criticism in gen- 
eral he cared little for, but he was thankful to have his 
attention directed to any fancied obscurity of meaning. 
In this, and in his use of words, Macaulay's example 
is invaluable to the young writer. 



BOOKS OF EEFERENCE. 



The Century CyclopcTclia of Names. 

Hare, Walks in London. 

Green, The History of the English People. 

Hale, Fall of the Stuarts. 

Morris, Age of Anne. 

McCarthy, Epoch of Reform. 

Milton, Poetical Works ; edited by David Masson, 3 vols. 

Prose Works, Bohn's Library, 5 vols. 
Addison, Collected Works, Bohn's Library. 
Macaulay, Essays. 

History of England. 

Poems. 
Masson, Life of John Milton, 7 vols. ; expensive. 
Pattison, Milton. 
CouRTHOPE, Addison. 

Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. 
Johnson, Lives of the Poets. 
Arnold, Mixed Essays. 
Lowell, Literary Essays. 
MoRLEY, John, Miscellanies. 
Saintsbury, Corrected Lnpressions. 
Stephen, Hours in a Library, third series. 
Thackeray, English Humorists. 
Taine, English Literature. 
GossE, History of Eighteenth Century Literature. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

OF IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THE PERIODS THAT INCLUDE 
THE LIVES OF MILTON, ADDISON, AND MACAULAY. 



1300-1318. Dante's Divine Comedy. 
1603. James I succeeded. 

1607. Virginia settled. 

1608. Milton born, December 9. 
1616. Death of Shakespeare. 
1620. Baicon's Novum Organum. 

1625. Charles I succeeded. 

1626. Buckingham impeached. 
1628. Petition of Right. 

1633. Milton's L'Allegro and II Penseroso. 
Jonson's Tale of a Tub. 

1634. Milton's Comus (acted). 

1636. Hampden refuses to pay ship money, 
1638. Milton's Lycidas. 

Milton travels abroad. 

1640. Long Parliament meets. 

1640-1660. Milton's prose writings, most of the Sonnets. 

1641. Execution of Strafford, May. 

The Grand Remonstrance, November. 

1642. Royalists withdraw from Parliament. 
1642-1646. Civil war, the Rebellion. 

1644. Battle of Marston Moor, July 3. 
Milton's Areopagitica. 

1645. Battle of Naseby, June 14. 

1646. Charles surrenders to the Scots, May. 

1648. Pride's Purge, December. 

1649. Execution of Charles 1, January 30. 
1651. Milton's Defensio Populi. 

xix 



XX CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 

1651. England proclaims itself a Commonwealth. 

Milton, Latin Secretary. 
1G53. Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector. 
1658. Death of Cromwell, September 3. 
1660. Charles II lands at Dover, May. 

Restoration of the Stuarts. 
1667. Milton's Paradise Lost. 

1671. Milton's Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. 
1678. Oates invents the Popish Plot. 

1682. Conspiracy and flight of Shaftesbury. 

1683. Rye-house Plot. 
1685. James II. 

Battle of Sedgemoor. 
Bloody Assizes. 

1687. Expulsion of Fellows of Magdalen. 

1688. Trial of the Seven Bishops. 
Landing of William of Orange. 

1689. William and Mary succeeded. 
Declaration of Rights. 

The " Glorious Revolution." 
Grand Alliance against France. 

1690. Battle of the Boyne, July 1. 
1694. Bank of England set up. 
1699. Addison travels. 

1701. Grand Alliance : Germany, England, and Holland 

against France. 

1702. Anne succeeded. 

1704. Battle of Blenheim, August 13. 
1706. Battle of Ramillies, May 23. 
Act of Union with Scotland. 
1709-1711. Tatler, founded by Steele. 

1710. Prosecution of Sacheverell, Tory reaction. 
Whigs dismissed. 

1711. Pope's Essay on Criticism. 

The Spectator, founded by Steele and Addison, pub- 
lished daily, 555 numbers. 

1712. The Rape of the Lock. 

1713. Guardian, founded by Steele. 
1715. Pope's Iliad. 

1719. Addison's death. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. xxi 

1721. Ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. 

1726. Gulliver's Travels. 

1727. George IL 

1748. Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. 

1755. Defeat of General Braddock. 

1758. Ministry of William Pitt. 
1758-1760. Idler, founded by Johnson. 

1765. Stamp Act passed. 

1776. Declaration of Independence, July 4. 

1781. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. 

1786. Trial of Warren Hastings. 

1800. Act of Union with Ireland. 

Macaulay born at Rothley Temple, October 25. 

1805. Battle of Trafalgar, October 21. 

1807. Abolition of slave trade. 

1818. Macaulay goes to the University of Cambridge. 

1821. George IV succeeded. 

1823. Mr. Skinner finds Milton's manuscript. 

1824. Macaulay a Fellow of Trinity. 

1825. Essay on Milton. 

1826. Called to the bar. 

1829. Catholic Emancipation bill. 

1830. William IV succeeded. 

Macaulay M. P. for Calne; speech on Jewish dis- 
abilities ; visit to Paris. 

1832. Parliamentary Reform bill passed, June 7. 

1833. Suppression of Colonial slavery. 

1834. System of national education begun. 
Macaulay goes to India as Member of Council. 

1837. Victoria succeeded. 

1838. Macaulay returns to Europe ; tour on the Continent. 

1839. M. P. for Edinburgh ; Secretary of War. 

1842. Lays of Ancient Rome. 

Speech on the Copyright Question. 

1843. Essay on Addison. 

Essays republished in book form. 
1848. First two volumes of the History published. 

1856. Macaulay resigns from Parliament. 

1857. Becomes Baron Macaulay of Rothley Temple. 
1859. Death of Macaulay at Holly Lodge, December 28. 



MILTON/ 



Towards the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemon, 
deputy keeper of the state papers, in the course of his 
researches ^ among the presses of his office, met with 
a large Latin manuscript. With it were found cor- 
rected copies of the foreign despatches written by Mil- 
ton while he filled the office of Secretary,^ and several 
papers relating to the Popish Trials and the Eye-house 
Plot. The whole was wrapped up in an envelope, 
superscribed To Mr. SUnner, Merchant On exam- 
ination, the large manuscript proved to be the long- 
lost essay on the Doctrine of Christianity, which, ac- 
cording to Wood and Toland, Milton finished after 
the Eestoration, and deposited with Cyriac Skinner. 
Skinner, it is well known, held the same political opin- 
ions with his illustrious friend. It is therefore prob- 
able, as Mr. Lemon conjectures, that he may have 
fallen under the suspicions of the Government during 
that persecution of the Whigs which followed the dis- 
solution of the Oxford parliament, and that, in con- 
sequence of a general seizure of his papers, this work 
may have been brought to the office ' in which it has 
been found. But whatever the adventures of the 



2 MACAULAY'S 

manuscript may have been, no doubt can exist that it 
is a genuine relic of the great poet. 

Mr. Sumner, who was commanded by his Majesty 
to edit and translate the treatise, has acquitted himself 
of his task in a manner honorable to his talents and 
to his character. His version is not indeed very easy 
or elegant ; but it is entitled to the praise of clearness 
and fidelity. His notes abound with interesting quo- 
tations, and have the rare merit of really elucidating 
the text. The preface is evideatly the work of a sen- 
sible and candid man, firm in his own religious opin- 
ions, and tolerant towards those of others. 

The book itself will not add much to the fame of 
Milton. It is, like all his Latin works, well written, 
though not exactly in the style of the prize essays ^ of 
Oxford and Cambridge. There is no elaborate imita- 
tion of classical antiquity, no scrupulous purity, none 
of the ceremonial cleanness which characterizes the 
diction of our academical Pharisees. The author 
does not attempt to polish and brighten his composition 
into the Ciceronian gloss and brilliancy. He does not, 
in short, sacrifice sense and spirit to pedantic refine- 
ments. The nature of his subject compelled him to 
use many words 

" That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp." ° 

But he writes with as much ease and freedom as if 
Latin were his mother-tongue; and, where he is least 
happy, his failure seems to arise from the carelessness 
of a native, not from the ignorance of a foreigner. We 
may apply to him what Denham with great felicity 
says of Cowley."^ He wears the garb, but not the 
clothes, of the ancients. 



MILTON. 3 

Throughout the volume are discernible the traces 
of a powerful and independent mind, emancipated 
from the influence of authority, and devoted to the 
search of truth. Milton professes to form his system 
from the Bible alone; and his digest of scriptural 
texts is certainly among the best that have appeared. 
But he is not always so happy m his inferences as in 
his citations. 

Some of the heterodox doctrines which he avows 
seemed to have excited considerable amazement, par- 
ticularly his Arianism,^ and his theory on the subject 
of polygamy.^ Yet we can scarcely conceive that any 
person could have read the Paradise Lost without 
suspecting him of the former; nor do we think that 
any reader acquainted with the history of his life ought 
to be much startled at the latter. The opinions which 
he has expressed respecting the nature of the Deity, 
the eternity of matter, and the observation of the Sab- 
bath, might, we think, have caused more just surprise. 

But we will not go into the discussion of these points. 
The book, were it far more orthodox or far more 
heretical than it is, would not much edify or corrupt 
the present generation. The men of our time are not 
to be converted or perverted by quartos. A few more 
days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to 
the dust and silence of the upper shelf. The name of 
its author, and the remarkable circumstances attend- 
ing its publication, will secure to it a certain degree of 
attention. For a month or two it will occupy a few 
minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few 
columns in every magazine ; and it will then, to borrow 
the elegant language of the play-bills, be withdrawn, 
to make room for the forth-coming novelties. 



4 MACAULAY'S 

We wish, however, to avail ourselves of the interest, 
transient as it may be, which this work has excited. 
The dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the 
life and miracles of a saint till they have awakened the 
devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some 
relic of him, a thread of his garment, a lock of his 
hair, or a drop of his blood. On the same principle, 
we intend to take advantage of the late interesting dis- 
covery, and, while this memorial of a great and good 
man is still in the hands of all, to say something of his 
moral and intellectual qualities. Nor, we are con- 
vinced, will the severest of our readers blame us if, on 
an occasion like the present, we turn for a short time 
from the topics of the day to commemorate, in all 
love and reverence, the genius and virtues of John 
Milton, the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the 
glory of English literature, the champion and the 
martyr of English liberty. 

It is by his poetry that Milton is best known; and 
it is of his poetry that we wish first to speak. By the 
general suffrage of the civilised ^^ world, his place 
has been assigned among the greatest masters of the 
art. His detractors, however, though outvoted, have 
not been silenced. There are many critics, and some 
of great name,^^ who contrive in the same breath to 
extol the poems and to decry the poet. The works 
they acknowledge, considered in themselves, may be 
classed among the noblest productions of the human 
mind. But they will not allow the author to rank 
with those great men ^^ who, born in the infancy of 
civilisation,^^ supplied, by their own powers, the want 
of instruction, and, though destitute of models them- 
selves, bequeathed to posterity models which defy imi- 



/ ■ ■ 

MILTON. 6 

tation. Milton, it is said, inherited what his prede- 
cessors created; he lived in an enlightened age; he 
received a finished education; and we must therefore, 
if we would form a just estimate of his powers, make 
large deductions in consideration of these advantages. 

We venture to say, on the contrary, paradoxical as 
the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to 
struggle with more unfavorable circumstances than 
Milton. He doubted, as he has himself owned, 
whether he had not been born " an age too late." ^^ 
For this notion Johnson has thought fit to make him 
the butt of much clumsy ^* ridicule. The poet, we 
believe, understood the nature of his art better than 
the critic. He knew that his poetical genius derived 
no advantage from the civilisation which surrounded 
him, or from the learning which he had acquired; 
and he looked back with something like regret to the 
ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions. 

We think that, as civilisation advances, poetry al- 
jhost necessarily declines.^^ Therefore, though we fer- 
/ vently admire those great works of imagination which 
have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire them 
the more because they have appeared in dark ages. 
On the contrary, we hold that the most wonderful and 
splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in 
a civilised age. We cannot understand why those who 
believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, 
that the earliest poets are generally the best, should 
wonder at the rule as if it were the exception. Surely 
the uniformity of the phenomenon indicates a corre- 
sponding uniformity in the cause. 

The fact is that common observers reason from the 
progress of the experimental sciences to that of the 



6 MACAULAY'S 

imitative arts. The improvement of the former is 
gradual and slow. Ages are spent in collecting ma- 
terials, ages more in separating and combining them. 
Even when a system has been formed, there is still 
something to add, to alter, or to reject. Every genera- 
tion enjoys the nse of a vast hoard bequeathed to it 
by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by 
fresh acquisitions, to future ages. In these pursuits, 
therefore, the first speculators lie under great disad- 
vantages, and, even when they fail, are entitled to 
praise. Their pupils, with far inferior intellectual 
powers, speedily surpass them in actual attainments. 
Every gir] who has read Mrs. Marcet's little dialogues 
on political economy could teach Montague or Walpole 
many lessons in finance. Any intelligent man may 
now, by resolutely applying himself for a few years 
to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton 
knew after half a century of study and meditation. 

But it is not thus with music, with painting, or 
with sculpture. Still less is it thus with poetry. The 
progress of refinement rarely supplies these arts with 
better objects of imitation. It may indeed improve 
the instruments which are necessary to the mechanical 
operations of the musician, the sculptor, and the 
painter. But language, the machine of the poet, is 
best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, 
like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. 
They advance from particular images to general terms. 
Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is 
philosophical, that of a half-civilised people is poetical. 

This change in the language of men is partly the 
cause and partly the effect of a corresponding change 
in the nature of their intellectual operations, of a 



MILTON. 7 

change by which science gains and poetry loses. Gen- 
eralisation is necessary to the advancement of knowl- 
edge ; but particularity is indispensable to the creations 
of the imagination. In proportion as men know more 
and think more, they look less at individuals and more 
at classes. They therefore make better theories and 
worse poems. They give us vague phrases instead of 
images, and personified qualities instead of men. They 
may be better able to analyse human nature than their 
predecessors. But analysis is not the business of the 
poet. His office is to portray, not to dissect. He 
may believe in a moral sense, like Shaftesbury; he 
may refer all human actions to self-interest, like Hel- 
vetius ; or he may never think about the matter at all. 
His creed on such subjects will no more influence his 
poetry, properly so called, than the notions which a 
painter may have conceived respecting the lachrymal 
glands, or the circulation of the blood, will affect the 
tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora. If 
Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of 
human actions, it is by no means certain that it would 
have been a good one. It is extremely improbable 
that it would have contained half so much able reason- 
ing on the subject as is to be found in the Fable of 
the Bees. But could Mandeville have created an lago ? 
Well as he knew how to resolve characters into their 
elements, would he have been able to combine those 
elements in such a manner as to make up a man, a real, 
living, individual man? 

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy 
poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, if any- 
thing which gives so much pleasure ought to be called 
unsoundness. By poetry we mean not all writing in 



8 MACAULAY'S 

verso, nor even all good writing in verse. Our defini- 
tion excludes many metrical compositions which, on 
other grounds, deserve the highest praise. By poetry 
we mean the art of employing words in such a manner 
as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art 
of doing by means of words what the painter does by 
means of colors. Thus the greatest of poets has de- 
scribed it, in lines universally admired for the vigor 
and felicity of their diction, and still more valuable 
on account of the just notion which they convey of the 
art in which he excelled: 

" As imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name." ^^ 

These are the fruits of the " fine frenzy ^' which he 
ascribes to the poet, — a fine frenzy, doubtless, but still 
a frenzy. Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry; but it 
is the truth of madness. The reasonings are just, but 
the premises are false. After the first suppositions 
have been made, everything ought to be consistent ; but 
those first suppositions require a degree of credulity 
which almost amounts to a partial and temporary de- 
rangement of the intellect. Hence of all people chil- 
dren are the most imaginative. They abandon them- 
selves without reserve to every illusion. Every image 
which is strongly presented to their mental eye pro- 
duces on them the effect of reality. ¥o man, what- 
ever his sensiblity may be, is ever affected by Hamlet 
or Lear as a little girl is affected by the story of poor 
Eed Eiding Hood. She knows that it is all false, 
that wolves cannot speak, that there are no wolves in 
England. Yet, in spite of her knowledge, she be- 



MILTON. 9 

lieves ; she weeps ; she trembles ; she dares not go into 
a dark room lest she should feel the teeth of the mon- 
ster at her throat. Such is the despotism of the im- 
agination over uncultivated minds. 

In a rude state of society, men are children with a 
greater variety of ideas. It is therefore in such a state 
of society that we may expect to find the poetical tem- 
perament in its highest perfection. In an enlightened 
age there will be much intelligence, much science, 
much philosophy, abundance of just classification and 
subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abun- 
dance of verses, and even of good ones; but little 
poetry. Men will judge and compare; but they will 
not create. They will talk about the old poets, and 
comment on them, and to a certain degree enjoy them. 
But they will scarcely be able to conceive the effect 
which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the 
agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek 
rhapsodists, according to Plato, could scarce recite 
Homer without falling into convulsions. The Mo- 
hawk hardly feels the scalping-knife while he shouts 
his death-song. The power which the ancient bards 
of Wales and Germany exercised over their auditors 
seems to modern readers almost miraculous. Such 
feelings are very rare in a civilised community, and 
most rare among those who participate most in its 
improvements. They linger longest among the peas- 
antry. 

Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, 
as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye 
of the body. And, as the magic lantern acts best in 
a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most completely 
in a dark age. As the light of knowledge breaks in 



10 MACAULAY'S 

upon its exhibitions, as the outlines of certainty be- 
come more and more definite, and the shades of proba- 
bility more and more distinct, the hues and lineaments 
of the phantoms which the poet calls up grow fainter 
and fainter. We cannot unite the incompatible ad- 
vantages of reality and deception, the clear discern- 
ment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction. 

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, as- 
pires to be a great poet, must first become a little 
child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his 
mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge 
which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title 
to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to 
him. His difficulties will be proportioned to his pro- 
ficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable among 
his contemporaries; and that proficiency will in gen- 
eral be proportioned to the vigor and activity of his 
mind. And it is well if, after all his sacrifices and 
exertions, his works do not resemble a lisping man or 
a modern ruin. We have seen in our own time great 
talents,^ ^ intense labor, and long meditation employed 
in this struggle against the spirit of the age, and em- 
ployed, we will not say absolutely in vain, but with 
dubious success and feeble applause. 

If these reasonings be just, no poet has ever tri- 
umphed over greater difficulties than Milton. He re- 
ceived a learned education; he was a profound and 
elegant classical scholar; he had studied all the mys- 
teries of rabbinical literature; he was intimately ac- 
quainted with every language of modern Europe from 
which either pleasure or information was then to be 
derived. He was perhaps the only great poet of later 
times who has been distinguished by the excellence of 



MILTON. 11 

his Ijatin verse. The genius of Petrarch was scarcely 
of the first order; and liis poems in tlie ancient lan- 
guage, though much praised by those who have never 
read them, are wretched compositions. Cowley, with 
all his admirable wit and ingenuity, had little imagina- 
tion; nor, indeed, do we think his classical diction 
comparable to that of Milton. The authority of John- 
son is against us on this point. But Jolmson had stud- 
ied the bad writers of the middle ages till he had be- 
come utterly insensible to the Augustan elegance, and 
was as ill qualified ^^ to judge between two Latin styles 
as an habitual drunkard to set up for a wine-taster. 

Versification in a dead language is an exotic, a far- 
fetched, costly, sickly imitation of that which elsewhere 
may be found in healthful and spontaneous perfection. 
The soils on which this rarity flourishes are in general 
as ill suited to the production of vigorous native poetry 
as the flower-pots of a hot-house to the growth of oaks. 
That the author of the Paradise Lost should have 
written the Epistle to Manso ^^ was truly wonderful. 
Never before were such marked originality and such 
exquisite mimicry found together. Indeed, in all the 
Latin poems of Milton the artificial manner indispen- 
sable to such works is admirably preserved, while, at 
the same time, his genius gives to them a peculiar 
charm, an air of nobleness and freedom, which distin- 
guishes them from all other writings of the same class. 
They remind us of the amusements of those angelic 
warriors who composed the cohort of Gabriel: 

" About him exercised heroic games 
The unarmed youth of heaven; but nigh at hand 
Celestial armory, shielrls, helms, and spears, 
Hung high, with diamond flaming and with gold." ^^ 



12 MACAULAY'S 

We cannot look upon the sportive exercises for which 
the genius of Milton nngirds itself without catching a 
glimpse of the gorgeous and terrible panoply which it 
is accustomed to wear. The strength of his imagina- 
tion triumphed over every obstacle. So intense and 
ardent was the fire of his mind, that it not only was not 
suffocated beneath the weight of fuel, but penetrated 
the whole superincumbent mass with its own heat and 
radiance. 

It is not our intention to attempt anything like a 
complete examination of the poetry of Milton. The 
public has long been agreed as to the merit of the most 
remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony of the 
numbers, and the excellence of that style which no 
rival has been able to equal and no parodist to degrade, 
which displays in their highest' perfection the idio- 
matic powers of the English tongue, and to which every 
ancient and every modern language has contributed 
something of grace, of energy, or of music. In the 
vast field of criticism on which we are entering, innu- 
merable reapers have already put their sickles. Yet 
the harvest is so abundant that the negligent search of 
a straggling gleaner may be rewarded with a sheaf. 

The most striking characteristic of the poetry of 
Milton is the extreme remoteness of the associations by 
means of which it acts on the reader. Its effect is 
produced, not so much by what it expresses, as by 
what it suggests ; not so much by the ideas which it di- 
rectly conveys, as by other ideas which are connected 
with them. He electrifies the mind through conduct- 
ors. The most unimaginative man must understand 
the Iliad. Homer gives him no choice,^^ and requires 
from him no exertion, but takes the whole upon him- 



MILTON. 13 

self, and sets the images in so clear a light that it 
is impossible to be blind to them. The works of Mil- 
ton cannot be comprehended or enjoyed unless the 
mind of the reader co-operate with that of the writer. 
He does not paint a finished picture, or play for a 
mere passive listener. He sketches, and leaves others 
to fill up the outline. He strikes the key-note, and 
expects his hearer to make out the melody. 

We often hear of the magical influence of poetry. 
The expression in general means nothing; but, ap- 
plied to the writings of Milton, it is most appropriate. 
His poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies less 
in its obvious meaning than in its occult power. 
There would seem, at first sight, to be no more in his 
words than in other words. But they are words of. 
enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced, than 
the past is present and the distant near. New forms 
of beauty start at once into existence, and all the 
burial-places of the memory give up their dead. 
Change the structure of the sentence; substitute one 
synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. 
The spell loses its power ; and he who should then hope 
to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken 
as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying, 
"Open Wheat,'' "Open Barley," to the door which 
obeyed no sound but " Open Sesame." The miserable 
failure of Dry den in his attempt to translate into his 
own diction some parts of the Paradise Lost is a re- 
markable instance of this. 

In support of these observations, we may remark 
that scarcely any passages in the poems of Milton are 
more generally known or more frequently repeated 
than those which are little more than muster-rolls of 



14 MACAULAY'S 

names. They are not always more appropriate or 
more melodious than other names. But they are 
charmed names. Every one of them is the first link 
in a long chain of associated ideas. Like the dwelling- 
place of our infancy revisited in manhood, like the 
song of our country heard in a strange land, they pro- 
duce upon us an effect wholly independent of their in- 
trinsic value. One transports us back to a remote 
period of history. Another places us among the novel 
scenes and manners of a distant region. A third 
evokes all the dear classical recollections of childhood, 
the school-room, the dog-eared Virgil, the holiday, and 
the prize. A fourth brings before us the splendid 
phantoms of chivalrous romance, the trophied lists, 
the embroidered housings, the quaint devices, the 
haunted forests, the enchanted gardens, the achieve- 
ments of enamored knights, and the smiles of rescued 
princesses. 

In none of the works of Milton is his peculiar man- 
ner more happily displayed than in the Allegro and 
the Penseroso. It is impossible to conceive that the 
mechanism of language can be brought to a more ex- 
quisite degree of perfection. These poems differ from 
others as attar of roses differs from ordinary rose- 
water, the close-packed essence from the thin, diluted 
mixture. They are, indeed, not so much poem.s as col- 
lections of hints, from each of which the reader is to 
make out a poem for himself. Every epithet is a text 
for a stanza. 

The Comus and the Samson Agonistes are works 
which, though of very different merit, offer some 
marked points of resemblance. Both are lyric poems 
in the form of plays. There are perhaps no two kinds 



MILTON. 15 

of composition so essentially dissimilar as the drama 
and the ode. The business of the dramatist is to keep 
himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his 
characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his per- 
sonal feelings, the illusion is broken. The effect is 
as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage 
by the voice of a prompter or the entrance of a scene- 
shifter. Hence it was that the tragedies of Byron 
were his least successful performances. They resemble 
those pasteboard pictures invented by the friend of 
children, Mr. Newbery, in which a single movable 
head goes round twenty different bodies, so that the 
same face looks out upon us successively, from the uni- 
form of a hussar, the furs of a judge, and the rags of 
a beggar. In all the characters, patriots and tyrants, 
haters and lovers, the frown and sneer of Harold were 
discernible in an instant. But this species of egotism, 
though fatal to the drama, is the inspiration of the ode. 
It is the part of the lyric poet to abandon himself, 
without reserve, to his own emotions. 

Between these hostile elements many great men 
have endeavored to effect an amalgamation, but never 
with complete success. The Greek drama, on the 
model of which the Samson was written, sprang from 
the ode. The dialogue was ingrafted on the chorus, 
and naturally partook of its character. The genius 
of the greatest of the Athenian dramatists co-operated 
with the circumstances under which tragedy made its 
first appearance. ^iSchylus was, head and heart, a 
lyric poet. In his time, the Greeks had far more inter- 
course with the East than in the days of Homer; and 
they had not yet acquired that immense superiority in 
war, in science, and in the arts, which, in the following 



16 MACAULAY'S 

generation, led them to treat the Asiatics with con- 
tempt. From the narrative of Herodotus it should 
seem that they still looked up, with the veneration of 
disciples, to Egypt and Assyria. At this period, ac- 
cordingly, it was natural that the literature of Greece 
should be tinctured with the Oriental style. And that 
style, we think, is discernible in the works of Pindar 
and ^schylus. The latter often reminds us of the 
Hebrew writers. The Book of Job, indeed, in con- 
duct and diction, bears a considerable resemblance to 
some of his dramas. Considered as plays, his works 
are absurd; considered as choruses, they are above all 
praise. If, for instance, we examine the address of 
Clytemnestra to Agamemnon on his return, or the de- 
scription of the seven Argive chiefs, by the principles of 
dramatic writing, we shall instantly condemn them as 
monstrous. But if we forget the characters, and think 
only of the poetry, we shall admit that it has never 
been surpassed in energy and magnificence. Sophocles 
made the Greek drama as dramatic as was consistent 
with its original form. His portraits of men have a 
sort of similarity; but it is the similarity, not of a 
painting, but of a bass-relief. It suggests a resem- 
blance ; but it does not produce an illusion. Euripides 
attempted to carry the reform further. But it was a 
task far beyond his powers, perhaps beyond any powers. 
Instead of correcting what was bad, he destroyed what 
was excellent. He substituted crutches for stilts, bad 
sermons for good odes. 

Milton, it is well known, admired Euripides highly, 
much more highly than, in our opinion, Euripides de- 
served. Indeed, the caresses which this partiality 
leads our countryman to bestow on " sad Electra's 



MILTON. 17 

poet " ^^ sometimes remind us of the beautiful Queen 
of Fairy-land kissing the long ears of Bottom.'^ At 
all events, there can be no doubt that this veneration 
for the Athenian, whether just or not, was injurious 
to the Samson Agonistes. Had Milton taken zEschy- 
lus for his model, he would have given himself up to 
the lyric inspiration, and poured out profusely all the 
treasures of his mind, without bestowing a thought on 
those dramatic properties which the nature of the work 
rendered it impossible to preserve. In the attempt to 
reconcile things in their own nature inconsistent he has 
failed, as every one else must have failed. We cannot 
identify ourselves with the characters, as in a good 
play. We cannot identify ourselves with the poet, as 
in a good ode. The conflicting ingredients, like an 
acid and an alkali mixed, neutralize each other. We 
are by no means insensible to the merits of this cele- 
brated piece, to the severe dignity of the style, the 
graceful and pathetic solemnity of the opening speech, 
or the wild and barbaric melody which gives so striking 
an effect to the choral passages. But we think it, 
we confess, the least successful effort of the genius of 
Milton. 

The Comus is framed on the model of the Italian 
masque,^* as the Samson is framed on the model of 
the Greek tragedy. It is certainly the noblest per- 
formance of the kind which exists in any language. It 
is as far superior to The Faithful Shepherdess,-^ as 
The Faithful Shepherdess is to the Aminta, or the 
Aminta to the Pastor Fido. It was well for Milton 
that he had here no Euripides to mislead him. He 
understood and loved the literature of modern Italy. 
But he did not feel for it the same veneration which he 



18 MACAULAY'S 

entertained for the remains of Athenian and Roman 
poetry, consecrated by so many lofty and endearing 
recollections. The faults, moreover, of his Italian 
predecessors were of a kind to which his mind had a 
deadly antipathy. He could stoop to a plain stylo, 
sometimes even to a bald style ; but false brilliancy was 
his utter aversion. His muse had no objection to a 
russet attire; but she turned with disgust from the 
finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the rags 
of a chimney-sweeper on May-day.^^ Whatever orna- 
ments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling 
to the sight, but capable of standing the severest test 
of the crucible. 

Milton attended in the Comus to the distinction 
which he afterward nes^lected in the Samson. He 
made his masque what it ought to be, essentially lyri- 
cal, and dramatic only in semblance. He has not at- 
tempted a fruitless struggle against a defect inherent 
in the nature of that species of composition; and he 
has therefore succeeded, wherever success was not im- 
possible. The speeches must be read as majestic 
soliloquies ; and he who so reads them will be enrapt- 
ured with their eloquence, their sublimity, and their 
music. The interruptions of the dialogue, however, 
impose a constraint upon the writer, and break the 
illusion of the reader. The finest passages are thosf* 
which are lyric in form as well as in spirit. " I should 
much commend," says the excellent Sir Henry Wotton 
in a letter to Milton, " the tragical part if the lyrical 
did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in 
your songs and odes, whereunto, I must plainly confess 
to you, I have seen yet nothing parallel in our lan- 
guage." The criticism was just. It is when Milton 



MILTON. 19 

escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is 
discharged from the labor of uniting two incongruous 
styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral rapt- 
ures without reserve, that he rises even above himself. 
Then, like his own good Genius bursting from the 
earthly form and weeds of Thyrsis,^'^ he stands forth 
in celestial freedom and beauty; he seems to cry ex- 
ultingly,— 

*' Now my task is smoothly done, 
I can fly or I can run," ^^ 

to skim the earth, to soar above the clouds, to bathe in 
the Elysian dew of the rainbow, and to inhale the 
balmy smells of nard and cassia, which the musky 
winds of the zephyr scatter through the cedared alleys 
of the Hesperides. 

There are several of the minor poems of Milton on 
which we would willingly make a few remarks. Still 
more willingly would we enter into a detailed examina- 
tion of that admirable poem, the Paradise Eegained, 
which, strangely enough, is scarcely ever mentioned 
except as an instance of the blindness of the parental 
affection which men of letters bear toward the off- 
spring of their intellects. That Milton was mistaken 
in preferring this work, excellent as it is, to the Para- 
dise Lost, we readily admit. But we are sure that 
the superiority of the Paradise Lost to the Paradise 
Eegained is not more decided than the superiority of 
the Paradise Regained to every poem which has since 
made its appearance. Our limits, however, prevent us 
from discussing the point at length. We hasten on to 
that extraordinary production which the general suf- 
frage of critics has placed in the highest class of hu- 
man compositions. 



20 MACAULAY'S 

The only poem of modern times which can be com- 
pared with the Paradise Lost is the Divine Comedy. 
The subject of Milton, in some points, resembled that 
of Dante; bnt he has treated it in a widely differ- 
ent manner. We cannot, we think, better illustrate 
our opinion respecting our own great poet than 
by contrasting him with the father of Tuscan litera- 
ture. 

The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante as 
the hieroglyphics ^^ of Egypt differed from the picture- 
writing of Mexico. The images which Dante employs 
speak for themselves ; they stand simply for what they 
are. Those of Milton have a signification which is 
often discernible only to the initiated. Their value 
depends less on what they directly represent than on 
what they remotely suggest. However strange, how- 
ever grotesque, may be the appearance which Dante 
undertakes to describe, he never shrinks from describ- 
ing it. He gives us the shape, the color, the sound, the 
smell, the taste; he counts the numbers; he measures 
the size. His similes are the illustrations of a trav- 
eller. Unlike those of other poets, and especially of 
Milton, they are introduced in a plain, business-like 
manner; not for the sake of any beauty in the objects 
from which they are drawn; not for the sake of any 
ornament which they may impart to the poem; but 
simply in order to make the meaning of the writer as 
clear to the reader as it is to himself. The ruins of 
the precipice which led from the sixth to the seventh 
circle of hell were like those of the rock which fell into 
the Adige on the south of Trent. The cataract of 
Phlegethon was like that of Aqua Cheta at the monas- 
tery of St. Benedict. The place where the heretics 



MILTON. 21 

were confined in burning tombs resembled the vast 
cemetery of Aries. 

Now let us compare ^^ with the exact details of 
Dante the dim intimations of Milton. We will cite 
a few examples. The English poet has never thought 
of taking the measure of Satan. He gives us merely 
a vague idea of vast bulk. In one passage the fiend 
lies stretched out huge in length, floating many a rood, 
equal in size to the earth-born enemies of Jove, or to 
the sea-monster which the mariner mistakes for an 
island. When he addresses himself to battle against 
the guardian angels, he stands like Teneriffe or Atlas : 
his stature reaches the sky. Contrast with these de- 
scriptions the lines in which Dante has described the 
gigantic spectre of Nimrod. " His face seemed to me 
as long and as broad as the ball of St. Peter's at Eome ; 
and his other limbs were in proportion; so that the 
bank, which concealed him from the waist downward, 
nevertheless showed so much of him that three tall 
Germans would in vain have attempted to reach to 
his hair." We are sensible that we do no justice to 
the admirable style of the Florentine poet. But 
Mr. Gary's translation is not at hand; and our 
version, however rude, is sufficient to illustrate our 
meaning. 

Once more, compare the lazar house in the eleventh 
book of the Paradise Lost with the last ward of Male- 
bolge in Dante. Milton avoids the loathsome details, 
and takes refuge in indistinct but solemn and tre- 
mendous imagery. Despair hurrying from couch to 
couch to mock the wretches with his attendance. Death 
shaking his dart over them, but, in spite of supplica- 
tions, delaying to strike. What says Dante ? " There 



22 MACAULAY'S 

was such a moan there as there would be if all the sick 
who, between July and September, are in the hospitals 
of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan swamps, and of 
Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench 
was issuing forth as is wont to issue from decayed 
limbs." 

We will not take upon ourselves the invidious office 
of settling precedency between two such writers. Each 
in his own department is incomparable; and each, we 
may remark, has wisely, or fortunately, taken a sub- 
ject adapted to exhibit his peculiar talent to the great- 
est advantage. The Divine Comedy is a personal nar- 
rative. Dante is the eye-witness and ear-witness of 
that which he relates. He is the very man who has 
heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second 
death, who has read the dusky characters on the portal 
within which there is no hope, who has hidden his face 
from the terrors of the Gorgon, who has fled from the 
hooks and the seething pitch of Barbariccia and Drag- 
hignazzo. His own hands have grasped the shaggy 
sides of Lucifer. His own feet have climbed the moun- 
tain of expiation. His own brow has been marked 
by the purifying angel. The reader would throw aside 
such a tale in incredulous disgust, unless it were told 
with the strongest air of veracity, with a sobriety even 
in its horrors, with the greatest precision and multi- 
plicity in its details. The narrative of Milton in this 
respect differs from that of Dante as the adventures of 
Amadis ^^ differ from those of Gulliver. The author 
of Amadis would have made his book ridiculous if he 
had introduced those minute particulars which give 
such a charm to the work of Swift, the nautical obser- 
vations, the affected delicacy about names, the official 



MILTON. 23 

documents transcribed at full length, and all the un- 
meaning gossip and scandal of the court, springing out 
of nothing, and tending to nothing. We are not 
shocked at being told that a man who lived, nobody 
knows when, saw many very strange sights, and we can 
easily abandon ourselves to the illusion of the romance. 
But when Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon, resident at Roth- 
erhithe,^^ tells us of pygmies and giants, flying islands, 
and philosophising horses, nothing but such circum- 
stantial touches could produce for a single moment a 
deception on the imagination. 

Of all the poets who have introduced into their 
works the agency of supernatural beings, Milton has 
succeeded best. Here Dante decidedly yields to him; 
and, as this is a point on which many rash and ill- 
considered judgments have been pronounced, we feel 
inclined to dwell on it a little longer. The most fatal 
error which a poet can possibly commit in the manage- 
ment of his machinery is that of attempting to phi- 
losophise too much. Milton has been often censured 
for ascribing to spirits many functions of which spirits 
must be incapable. But these objections, though sanc- 
tioned by eminent names,^^ originate, we venture to 
say, in profound ignorance of the art of poetry. 

What is spirit? What are our own minds, the 
portion of spirit with which we are best acquainted? 
We observe certain phenomena. We cannot explain 
them into material causes. We therefore infer that 
there exists something which is not material. But of 
this something we have no idea. We can define it only 
by negatives. We can reason about it only by symbols. 
We use the word ; but we have no image of the thing ; 
and the business of poetry is with images, and not with 



24 MACAULAY'S 

words. The poet uses words, indeed; but they are 
merely the instruments of his art, not its objects. 
They are the materials which he is to dispose in such 
a manner as to present a picture to the mental eye. 
And if they are not so disposed, they are no more en- 
titled to be called poetry than a bale of canvas and a 
box of colors to be called a painting. 

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the 
great mass of men must have images. The strong 
tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to 
idolatry can be explained on no other principle. The 
first inhabitants of Greece, there is reason to believe, 
worshipped one invisible Deity.^* But the necessity 
of having something more definite to adore produced, 
in a few centuries, the innumerable crowd of gods and 
goddesses. In like manner, the ancient Persians 
thought it impious to exhibit the Creator under a 
human form. Yet even these transferred to the sun 
the worship which, in speculation, they considered due 
only to the Supreme Mind. The history of the Jews 
is the record of a continued struggle between pure 
theism, supported by the most terrible sanctions, and 
the strangely fascinating desire of having some visible 
and tangible object of adoration. Perhaps none of the 
secondary causes ^^ which Gibbon has assigned for the 
rapidity with which Christianity spread over the world, 
while Judaism scarcely ever acquired a proselyte, 
operated more powerfully than this feeling. God, the 
uncreated, the incomprehensible, the invisible, at- 
tracted few worshippers. A philosopher might ad- 
mire so noble a conception ; but the crowd turned away 
in disgust from words which presented no image to 
their minds. It was before Deity embodied in a 



MILTON. 25 

human form, walking among men, partaking of their 
infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their 
graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the 
cross, that the prejudices of the Synagogue, and the 
doubts of the Academy, and the pride of the Portico, 
and the fasces of the Lictor, and the swords of thirty 
legions, were humbled in the dust. Soon after Chris- 
tianity had achieved its triumph, the principle which 
had assisted it began to corrupt it. It became a new 
paganism. Patron saints assumed the offices of house- 
hold gods. St. George took the place of Mars. St. 
Elmo consoled the mariner for the loss of Castor and 
Pollux. The Virgin Mother and Cecilia succeeded to 
Venus and the Muses. The fascination of sex and 
loveliness was again joined to that of celestial dignity ; 
and the homage of chivalry was blended with that of 
religion. Eeformers have often made a stand against 
these feelings ; but never with more than apparent and 
partial success. The men who demolished the images 
in cathedrals have not always been able to demolish 
those which were enshrined in their minds. It would 
not be difficult to show that in politics the same rule 
holds good. Doctrines, we are afraid, must generally 
be embodied before they can excite a strong public feel- 
ing. The multitude is more easily interested for the 
most unmeaning badge, or the most insignificant 
name, than for the most important principle. 

From these considerations, we infer that no poet 
who should affect that metaphysical accuracy for the 
want of which Milton has been blamed would escape a 
disgraceful failure. Still, however, there was another 
extreme which, though far less dangerous, was also to 
be avoided. The imaginations of men are in a great 



26 MACAULAY'S 

measure under the control of their opinions. The 
most exquisite art of poetical coloring can produce no 
illusion when it is employed to represent that which is 
at once perceived to be incongruous and absurd. Mil- 
ton wrote in an age of philosophers and theologians. 
It was necessary, therefore, for him to abstain from 
giving such a shock to their understandings as might 
break the charm which it was his object to throw over 
their imaginations. This is the real explanation of the 
indistinctness and inconsistency with which he has 
often been reproached. Dr. Johnson acknowledges that 
it was absolutely necessary that the spirits should be 
clothed with material forms. " But/^ says he, " the 
poet should have secured the consistency of his system 
by keeping immateriality out of sight, and seducing the 
reader to drop it from his thoughts." This is easily 
said; but what if Milton could not seduce his readers 
to drop immateriality from their thoughts? What 
if the contrary opinion had taken so full a possession 
of the minds of men as to leave no room even for the 
half belief which poetry requires? Such we suspect 
to have been the case. It was impossible for the poet 
to adopt altogether the material or the immaterial sys- 
tem. He therefore took his stand on the debatable 
ground. He left the whole in ambiguity. He has 
doubtless, by so doing, laid himself open to the charge 
of inconsistency. But, though philosophically in the 
wrong, we cannot but believe that he was poetically in 
the right.^^ This task, which almost any other writer 
v/ould have found impracticable, was easy to him. 
The peculiar art which he possessed of communicating 
his meaning circuitously through a long succession of 
associated ideas, and of intimating more than he ex- 



MILTON. 27 

pressed, enabled him to disguise those incongruities 
which he could not avoid. 

Poetry which relates to the beings of another world 
ought to be at once mysterious and picturesque. That 
of Milton is so. That of Dante is picturesque, indeed, 
beyond any that ever was written. Its effect ap- 
proaches to that produced by the pencil or the chisel. 
But it is picturesque to the exclusion of all mystery. 
This is a fault on the right side, a fault inseparable 
from the plan of Dante's poem, which, as we have 
already observed, rendered the utmost accuracy of de- 
scription necessary. Still it is a fault. The super- 
natural agents excite an interest; but it is not the in- 
terest which is proper to supernatural agents. We 
feel that we could talk to the ghosts and demons with- 
out any emotion of unearthly awe. We could, like 
Don Juan, ask them to supper, and eat heartily in their 
company. Dante's angels are good men with wings. 
His devils are spiteful, ugly executioners. His dead 
men are merely living men in strange situations. The 
scene which passes between the poet and Farinata is 
justly celebrated. Still, Farinata in the burning tomb 
is exactly what Farinata would have been at an auto 
da fe. Nothing can be more touching than the first 
interview of Dante and Beatrice. Yet what is it but 
a lovely woman chiding, with sweet, austere compo- 
sure, the lover for whose affection she is grateful, but 
whose vices she reprobates? The feelings which give 
the passage its charm would suit the streets of Flor- 
ence as well as the summit of the Mount of Purgatory. 

The spirits of Milton are unlike those of almost all 
other writers. His fiends, in particular, are wonder- 
ful creations. They are not metaphysical abstrac- 
4 



28 MACAULAY'S 

tions. They are not wicked men. They are not ugly 
beasts. They have no horns, no tails, none of the fee- 
faw-fum of Tasso and Klopstock. They have just 
enough in common with human nature to be intelli- 
gible to human beings. Their characters are, like 
their forms, marked by a certain dim resemblance to 
those of men, but exaggerated to gigantic dimensions, 
and veiled in mysterious gloom. 

Perhaps the gods and demons of yEschylus may 
best bear a comparison with the angels and devils of 
Milton. The style of the Athenian had, as we have 
remarked, something of the oriental character ; and the 
same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. It 
has nothing of the amenity and elegance which we 
generally find in the superstitions of Greece. All is 
rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of 
^schylus seem to harmonize less with the fragrant 
groves and graceful porticos in Avhich his countrymen 
paid their vows to the God of Light and Goddess of 
Desire than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths 
of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined her mystic 
Osiris, or in which Hindostan still bows down to her 
seven-headed idols. His favorite gods are those of the 
elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, com- 
pared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and 
an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable 
Furies. Foremost among his creations of this class 
stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the 
friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of 
heaven. Prometheus bears undoubtedly a consider- 
able resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both we 
find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, 
the same unconquerable pride. In both characters 



MILTON. 29 

also are mingled, though in very different proportions, 
some kind and generous feelings. Prometheus, how- 
ever, is hardly superhuman enough. He talks too 
much of his chains and his uneasy posture ; he is rather 
too much depressed and agitated. His resolution 
seems to depend on the knowledge which he possesses 
that he holds the fate of his torturer in his hands, and 
that the hour of his release will surely come. But 
Satan is a creature of another sphere. The might 
of his intellectual nature is victorious over the extrem- 
ity of pain. Amidst agonies which cannot be con- 
ceived without horror, he deliberates, resolves, and 
even exults. Against the sword of Michael, against 
the thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, and 
the marl burning with solid fire, against the prospect 
of an eternity of unintermitted jnisery, his spirit bears 
up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies, re- 
quiring no support from anything external, nor even 
from hope itself. 

To return for a moment to the parallel which we 
have been attempting to draw between Milton and 
Dante, we would add that the poetry of these great men 
has in a considerable degree taken its character from 
their m.oral qualities. They are not egotists. They 
rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies on their readers. 
They have nothing in common with those modern beg- 
gars for fame who extort a pittance from the compas- 
sion of the inexperienced by exposing the nakedness 
and sores of their minds. Yet it would be difficult to 
name two writers whose works have been more com- 
pletely, though undesignedly, colored by their personal 
feelings. 

The character of Milton was peculiarly distin- 



30 MACAULAY'S 

guished by loftiness of spirit; that of Dante by in- 
tensity of feeling. In every line of the Divine Comedy 
we discern the asperity which is produced by pride 
struggling with misery. There is perhaps no work in 
the world so deeply and uniformly sorrowful. The 
melancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice. It was 
not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, 
the effect of external circumstances. It was from with- 
in. Neither love nor glory, neither the conflicts of 
earth nor the hope of heaven, could dispel it. It 
turned every consolation and every pleasure into its 
own nature. It resembled that noxious Sardinian soil 
of which the intense bitterness is said to have been per- 
ceptible even in its honey. His mind was, in the noble 
language of the Hebrew poet, " a land of darkness, as 
darkness itself, and where -the light was as darkness." ^^ 
The gloom of his character discolors all the passions of 
men, and all the face of nature, and tinges with its 
own livid hue the flowers of paradise and the glories 
of the eternal throne. All the portraits of him are 
singularly characteristic. No person can look on the 
features, noble even to ruggedness, the dark furrows of 
the cheek, the haggard and woful stare of the eye, the 
sullen and contemptuous curve of the lip, and doubt 
that they belong to a man too proud and too sensitive 
to be happy. 

Milton was, like Dante, a statesman and a lover; 
and, like Dante, he had been unfortunate in ambition 
and in love. He had survived his health and his sight, 
the comforts of his home, and the prosperity of his 
party. Of the great men by whom he had been dis- 
tinguished at his entrance into life, some had been 
taken away from the evil to come; some had carried 



MILTON. 31 

into foreign climates their unconquerable hatred of 
oppression; some were pining in dungeons; and some 
had poured forth their blood on scaffolds. Venal 
and licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent 
to clothe the thoughts of a pandar in the style of a 
bellman, were now the favorite writers of the sov- 
ereign and of the public. It was a loathsome herd ; 
which could be compared to nothing so fitly as to the 
rabble of Comus, grotesque monsters, half bestial, half 
human, dropping with wine, bloated with gluttony, 
and reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these that fair 
muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the masque, 
lofty, spotless, and serene, to be chattered at, and 
pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole rout of satyrs 
And goblins. If ever despondency and asperity could 
be excused in any man, they might have been excused 
in Milton. But the strength of his mind overcame 
every calamity. Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, 
nor penury, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disap- 
pointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, 
had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience. 
His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were 
singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps 
stern; but it was a temper which no sufferings could 
render sullen or fretful. Such as it was when, on the 
eve of great events,^^ he returned from his travels, in 
the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with lit- 
erary distinctions, and glowing with patriotic hopes; 
such it continued to be when, after having experienced 
every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, 
poor, sightless, and disgraced, he retired to his hovel 
to die. 

Hence it was that, though he wrote the Paradise 



32 MACAULAY'S 

Lost at a time of life when images of beauty and ten- 
derness are in general beginning to fade, even from 
those minds in which they have not been effaced by 
anxiety and disappointment, he adorned it with all 
that is most lovely and delightful in the physical and 
in the moral world. Neither Theocritus nor Ariosto 
had a finer or a more healthful sense of the pleasant- 
ness of external objects, or loved better to luxuriate 
amidst sunbeams and flowers, the songs of nightin- 
gales, the juice of summer fruits, and the coolness of 
shady fountains. His conception of love unites all the 
voluptuousness of the oriental harem, and all the gal- 
lantry of the chivalric tournament, with all the pure 
and quiet affection of an English fireside.^^ His 
poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. 
Nooks and dells, beautiful as fairy-land, are em- 
bosomed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations. 
The roses and myrtles bloom unchillcd on the verge 
of the avalanche. 

Traces, indeed, of the peculiar character of Milton 
may be found in all his w^orks ; but it is most strongly 
displayed in the Sonnets. Those remarkable poems 
have been undervalued by critics who have not under- 
stood their nature. They have no epigrammatic point. 
There is none of the ingenuity of Filicaja in the 
thought, none of the hard and brilliant enamel of 
Petrarch in the style. They are simple but majestic 
records of the feelings of the poet, as little tricked out 
for the public eye as his diary would have been. A 
victory, an expected attack upon the city, a momentary 
fit of depression or exultation, a jest thrown out 
against one of his books, a dream which for a short 
time restored to him that beautiful face *^ over which 



MILTON. 33 

the grave had closed forever, led him to musings, 
which, without effort, shaped themselves into verse. 
The unity of sentiment and severity of style which 
characterize these little pieces remind us of the Greek 
Anthology, or perhaps still more of the Collects of the 
English Liturgy. The noble poem on the Massacres 
of Piedmont is strictly a collect in verse. 

The Sonnets are more or less striking, according as 
the occasions which gave birth to them are more or 
less interesting,*^ But they are, almost without ex- 
ception, dignified by a sobriety and greatness of mind 
to which we know not where to look for a parallel. It 
would, indeed, be scarcely safe to draw any decided 
inferences as to the character of a writer from pas- 
sages directly egotistical. But the qualities which 
we have ascribed to Milton, though perhaps most 
strongly marked in those parts of his works which 
treat of his personal feelings, are distinguishable in 
every page, and impart to all his writings, prose and 
poetry, English, Latin, and Italian, a strong family 
likeness. 

His public conduct was such as was to be expected 
from a man of a spirit so high and of an intellect so 
powerful. He lived at one of the most memorable eras 
in the history of mankind, at the very crisis of the 
great conflict between Oromasdes and Arimanes,*l 
liberty and despotism, reason and prejudice. That 
great battle was fought for no single generation, for no 
single land. The destinies of the human race were 
staked on the same cast with the freedom of the Eng- 
lish people. Then were first proclaimed those mighty 
principles which have since worked their way into the 
depths of the American forests, which have roused 



34 MACAULAY'S 

Greece *^ from the slavery and degradation of two thou- 
sand years, and which, from one end of Europe to the 
other, have kindled an unquenchable fire in the hearts 
of the oppressed, and loosed the knees of the oppressors 
with an unwonted fear. 

Of those principles, then struggling for their in- 
fant existence, Milton was the most devoted and elo- 
quent literary champion. We need not say how much 
we admire his public conduct. But we cannot disguise 
from ourselves that a large portion of his countrymen 
still think it unjustifiable. The civil war, indeed, has 
been more discussed, and is less understood, than any 
event in English history. The friends of liberty la- 
bored under the disadvantage of which the lion in the 
fable ** complained so bitterly. Though they were 
the conquerors, their enemies were the painters. As a 
body, the Eoundheads had done .their utmost to decry 
and ruin literature ; and literature was even with them 
as, in the long run, it always is with its enemies. The 
best book on their side of the question is the charming 
narrative of Mrs. Hutchinson. May's History of the 
Parliament is good; but it breaks off at the most in- 
teresting crisis of the struggle. The performance of 
Ludlow is foolish and violent; and most of the later 
writers who have espoused the same cause — Oldmixon, 
for instance, and Catherine Macaulaj^ — have, to say the 
least, been more distinguished by zeal than either by 
candor or by skill. On the other side are the most 
authoritative and the most popular historical works 
in our language, that of Clarendon, and that of Hume. 
The former is not only ably Written and full of valu- 
able information, but has also an air of dignity and 
sincerity which makes even the prejudices and errors 



MILTON. 35 

with which it abounds respectable. Hume, from whose 
fascinating narrative the great mass of the reading 
public are still contented to take their opinions, hated 
religion so much that he hated liberty for having been 
allied with religion, and has pleaded the cause of tyr- 
anny with the dexterity of an advocate while affecting 
the impartiality of a judge. 

The public conduct of Milton must be approved or 
condemned according as the resistance of the people to 
Charles the First shall appear to be justifiable or 
criminal. We shall, therefore, make no apology for 
dedicating a few pages to the discussion of that inter- 
esting and most important question. We shall not 
argue it on general grounds. We shall not recur to 
those primary principles from which the claim of any 
government to the obedience of its subjects is to be 
deduced. We are entitled to that vantage-ground; 
but we will relinquish it. We are, on this point, so 
confident of superiority, that we are not unwill- 
ing to imitate the ostentatious generosity of those 
ancient knights who vowed to joust without hel- 
met or shield against all enemies, and to give their 
antagonists the advantage of sun and wind. We will 
take the naked constitutional question. We confidently 
affirm that every reason which can be urged in favor of 
the Eevolution of 1688 may be urged with at least 
equal force in favor of what is called the Great Re- 
bellion. 

In one respect, only, we think, can the warmest 
admirers of Charles venture to say that he was a better 
sovereign than his son. He was not, in name and 
profession, a Papist; we say in name and profession, 
because both Charles himself and his creature Laud, 



36 MACAULAY'S 

while they abjured the innocent badges of popery, re- 
tained all its worst vices, a complete subjection of rea- 
son to authority, a weak preference of form to sub- 
stance, a childish passion for mummeries, an idolatrous 
veneration for the priestly character, and, above all, 
a merciless intolerance. This, however, we waive. 
We will concede that Charles was a good Protestant; 
but we say that his Protestantism does not make the 
slightest distinction between his case and that of 
James. 

The principles of the Kevolution have often been 
grossly misrepresented, and never more than in the 
course of the present year. There is a certain class of 
men,^^ who, while they profess to hold in reverence the 
great names and great actions of former times, never 
look at them for any other purpose than in order to 
find in them some excuse for existing abuses. In every 
venerable precedent they pass by what is essential, and 
take only what is accidental; they keep out of sight 
what is beneficial, and hold up to public imitation all 
that is defective. If in any part of any great exam- 
ple there be anything unsound, these flesh-flies detect 
it with an unerring instinct, and dart upon it with a 
ravenous delight. If some good end has been at- 
tained in spite of them, they feel, with their prototype, 
that 

" Their labor must be to pervert that end, 
And out of good still to find means of evil." *^ 

To the blessings which England has derived from 
the Eevolution these people are utterly insensible. 
The expulsion of a tyrant, the solemn recognition of 
popular rights, liberty, security, toleration, all go for 
nothing with them. One sect there was, which, from 



MILTON. 37 

unfortunate temporary causes, it was thought neces- 
sary to keep under close restraint. One part of the 
empire there was so unhappily circumstanced, that at 
that time its misery was necessary to our happiness, 
and its slavery to our freedom. These are the parts 
of the Eevolution which the politicians of whom we 
speak love to contemplate, and which seem to them 
not indeed to vindicate, but in some degree to palliate, 
the good which it has produced. Talk to them of 
Naples, of Spain, or of South America. They stand 
forth zealots for the doctrine of divine right which has 
now come back to us like a thief from transportation, 
under the alias of legitimacy. But mention the mis- 
eries of Ireland. Then William is a hero. Then 
Somers and Shrewsbury are great men. Then the 
Eevolution is a glorious era. The very same persons 
who, in this country, never omit an opportunity of re- 
viving every wretched Jacobite slander respecting the 
Whigs of that period, have no sooner crossed St. 
George's Channel than they begin to fill their bumpers 
to the glorious and immortal memory. They may 
truly boast that they look not at men, but at measures. 
So that evil be done, they care not who does it ; the ar- 
bitrary Charles, or the liberal William, Ferdinand the 
Catholic, or Frederic the Protestant. On such occa- 
sions their deadliest opponents may reckon upon their 
candid construction. The bold assertions of these peo- 
ple have of late impressed a large portion of the public 
with an opinion that James the Second was expelled 
simply because he was a Catholic, and that the Revolu- 
tion was essentially a Protestant Revolution. 

But this certainly was not the case; nor can any 
person who has acquired more knowledge of the history 



38 MACAULAY'S 

of those times than is to be found in Goldsmith's 
Abridgment believe that, if James had held his own 
religious opinions without wishing to make proselytes, 
or if, wishing even to make proselytes, he had content- 
ed himself with exerting only his constitutional influ- 
ence for that purpose, the Prince of Orange would 
ever have been invited over. Our ancestors, we sup- 
pose, knew their own meaning ; and, if we may believe 
them., their hostility was primarily not to popery, but 
to tyranny. They did not drive out a tyrant because 
he was a Catholic; but they excluded Catholics from 
the crown because they thought them likely to be 
tyrants. The ground on which they, in their famous 
resolution, declared the throne vacant was this, " that 
James had broken the fundamental laws of the king- 
dom." Every man, therefore, who approves of the 
Revolution of 1688 must hold that the breach of fun- 
damental laws on the part of the sovereign justifies 
resistance. The question, then, is this: Had Charles 
the First broken the fundamental laws of England? 

No person can answer in the negative, unless he re- 
fuses credit, not merely to all the accusations brought 
against Charles by his opponents, but to the narratives 
of the warmest Royalists, and to the confessions of the 
king himself. If there be any truth in any historian 
of any party who has related the events of that reign, 
the conduct of Charles, from his accession to the 
meeting of the Long Parliament, had been a continued 
course of oppression and treachery. Let those who 
applaud the Revolution and condemn the Rebellion 
mention one act of James the Second to which a paral- 
lel is not to be found in the history of his father. Let 
them lay their fingers on a single article in the Decla- 



MILTON. 39 

ration of Eight, presented by the two Houses to Wil- 
liam and Mary, which Charles is not acknowledged to 
have violated. He had, according to the testimony of 
his own friends, usurped the functions of the legisla- 
ture, raised taxes without the consent of Parliament, 
and quartered troops on the people in the most illegal 
and vexatious manner. Not a single session of Parlia- 
ment had passed without some unconstitutional attack 
on the freedom of debate; the right of petition was 
grossly violated; arbitrary judgments, exorbitant 
fines, and unwarranted imprisonments were grievances 
of daily occurrence. If these things do not Justify re- 
sistance, the Revolution was treason; if they do, the 
Great Eebellion was laudable. 

But, it is said, why not adopt milder measures? 
Why, after the king had consented to so many reforms 
and renounced so many oppressive prerogatives, did 
the Parliament continue to rise in their demands at the 
risk of provoking a civil war? The ship-money had 
been given up. The Star-chamber had been abolished. 
Provision had been made for the frequent convocation 
and secure deliberation of parliaments. Why not pur- 
sue an end confessedly good by peaceable and regular 
means ? We recur again to the analogy of the Revolu- 
tion. Why was James driven from the throne? Why 
was he not retained upon conditions? He, too, had 
offered to call a free Parliament, and to submit to its 
decision all the matters in dispute. Yet we are in the 
habit of praising our forefathers, who preferred a revo- 
lution, a disputed succession, a dynasty of strangers, 
twenty years of foreign and intestine war, a standing 
army, and a national debt, to the rule, however re- 
stricted, of a tried and proved tyrant. The Long Par- 



40 MACAULAY'S ' 

liament acted on the same principle, and is entitled to 
the same praise. They could not trust the king. He 
had no doubt passed salutary laws ; but what assurance 
was there that he would not break them ? He had re- 
nounced oppressive prerogatives; but where was the 
security that he would not resume them? The nation 
had to deal with a man whom no tie could bind, a man 
who made and broke promises with equal facility, a 
man whose honor had been a hundred times pawned 
and never redeemed. 

Here, indeed, the Long Parliament stands on still 
stronger ground than the convention of 1688. No ac- 
tion of James can be compared to the conduct of 
Charles with respect to the Petition of Eight. The 
Lords and Commons present him with a bill in which 
the constitutional limits of his power are marked out. 
He hesitates ; he evades ; at last he bargains to give his 
assent for five subsidies. The bill receives his solemn 
assent; the subsidies are voted; but no sooner is the 
tyrant relieved than he returns at once to all the arbi- 
trary measures which he had bound himself to aban- 
don, and violates all the clauses of the very act which 
he had been paid to pass. 

For more than ten years the people had seen the 
rights which were theirs by a double claim, by imme- 
morial inheritance and by recent purchase, infringed 
by the perfidies king who had recognized them. At 
length circumstances compelled Charles to summon 
another parliament ; another chance was given to our 
fathers : were they to throw it away as they had thrown 
away the former ? Were they again to be cozened by le 
roi le veut ? *'^ Were they again to advance their money 
on pledges which had been forfeited over and over 



MILTON. 41 

again? Were they to lay a second Petition of Eight 
at the foot of the throne, to grant another lavisli aid in 
exchange for another unmeaning ceremony, and then 
to take their departure, till, after ten years more of 
fraud and oppression, their prince should again re- 
quire a supply, and again repay it with a perjury? 
They were compelled to choose whether they would 
trust a tyrant or conquer him. We think that they 
chose wisely and nobly. 

The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of 
other malefactors against whom overwhelming evi- 
dence is produced, generally decline all controversy 
about the facts, and content themselves with calling 
testimony to character. He had so many private 
virtues! And had James the Second no private vir- 
tues? Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies 
themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues? 
And what, after all, are the virtues ascribed to 
Charles? A religious zeal, not more sincere than 
that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded, 
and a few of the ordinary household decencies which 
half the tombstones in England claim for those who 
lie beneath them. A good father ! A good husband ! 
Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution, 
tyranny, and falsehood ! 

We charge him with having broken his coronation 
oath; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow. 
We accuse him of having given up his people to the 
merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard- 
hearted of prelates; and the defence is that he took 
his little son on his knee and kissed him ! We censure 
him for having violated the articles of the Petition of 
Right, after having, for good and valuable considera- 



42 MACAULAY'S 

tion, promised to observe them; and we are informed 
that he was accustomed to hear prayers at six o'clock 
in the morning ! It is to such considerations as these, 
together with his Vandyke dress, his handsome face, 
and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily be- 
lieve, most of his popularity with the present genera- 
tion. 

For ourselves, we own that we do not understand 
the common phrase, " a good man, but a bad king/' 
We can as easily conceive a good man and an unnatural 
father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. We 
cannot, in estimating the character of an individual, 
leave out of our consideration his conduct in the most 
important of all human relations ; and if in that rela- 
tion we find him to have been selfish, cruel, and deceit- 
ful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad man, in 
spite of all his temperance at table and all his regu- 
larity at chapel. 

We cannot refrain from adding a few words re- 
specting a topic on which the defenders of Charles are 
fond of dwelling. If, they say, he governed his people 
ill, he at least governed them after the example of his 
predecessors. If he violated their privileges, it was be- 
cause those privileges had not been accurately defined. 
No act of oppression has ever been imputed to him 
which has not a parallel in the annals of the Tudors. 
This point Hume has labored, Avith an art which is as 
discreditable in a historical work as it would be ad- 
mirable in a forensic address. The answer is short, 
clear, and decisive. Charles had assented to the Peti- 
tion of Eight. He had renounced the oppressive 
powers said to have been exercised by his predecessors, 
and he had renounced them for monev. He was not 



MILTON. 43 

entitled to set up his antiquated claims against his own 
recent release. 

These arguments are so obvious that it may seem 
superfluous to dwell upon them. But those who have 
observed how much the events of that time are misrep- 
resented and misunderstood will not blame us for 
stating the case simply. It is a case of which the sim- 
plest statement is the strongest. 

The enemies of the Parliament, indeed, rarely 
choose to take issue on the great points of the ques- 
tion. They content themselves with exposing some 
of the crimes and follies to which public commotions 
necessarily give birth. They bewail the unmerited 
fate of Strafford. They execrate the lawless violence of 
the army. They laugh at the scriptural names of the 
preachers. Major-generals fleecing their districts; 
soldiers revelling on the spoils of a ruined peas- 
antry ; upstarts, enriched by the public plunder, taking 
possession of the hospitable firesides and hereditary 
trees of the old gentry; boys smashing the beautiful 
windows of cathedrals; Quakers riding naked through 
the market-place; Fifth-monarchy-men shouting for 
King Jesus; agitators lecturing from the tops of tubs 
on the fate of Agag ; all these, they tell us, were the off- 
spring of the Great Eebellion. 

Be it so. We are not careful to answer in this 
matter. These charges, were they infinitely more im- 
portant, would not alter our opinion of an event which 
alone has made us to differ from the slaves who crouch 
beneath despotic sceptres. Many evils, no doubt, were 
produced by the civil war. They were the price of our 
liberty. Has the acquisition been worth the sacrifice? 
It is the nature of the devil of tyranny to tear and rend 



44 MACAULAY'S 

the body which he leaves. Are the miseries of con- 
tinued possession less horrible than the struggles of 
the tremendous exorcism? 

If it were possible that a people brought up under 
an intolerant and arbitrary system could subvert that 
system without acts of cruelty and folly, half the ob- 
jections to despotic power would be removed. We 
should, in that case, be compelled to acknowledge that 
it at least produces no pernicious effects on the intel- 
lectual and moral character of a nation. We deplore 
the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the 
more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel 
that a revolution was necessary. The violence of those 
outrages will always be proportioned to the ferocity 
and ignorance of the people; and the ferocity and 
ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the 
oppression and degradation under which they have been 
accustomed to live. Thus it was in our civil war. The 
heads of the church and state reaped only that which 
they had sown. The government had prohibited free 
discussion; it had done its best to keep the people 
unacquainted with their duties and their rights. The 
retribution was just and natural. If our rulers suf- 
fered from popular ignorance, it was because they had 
themselves taken away the key of knowledge. If they 
were assailed with blind fury, it was because they had 
exacted an equally blind submission. 

It is the character of such revolutions that we al- 
ways see the worst of them at first. Till men have 
been some time free, they know not how to use their 
freedom. The natives of wine countries are generally 
sober. In climates where wine is a rarity intemper- 
ance abounds. A newly liberated people may be com- 



MILTON. 45 

pared to a northern army encamped on the Rhine or 
the Xeres."*^ It is said that when soldiers in such a 
situation first find themselves able to indulge without 
restraint in such a rare and expensive luxury, nothing 
is to be seen but intoxication. Soon, however, plenty 
teaches discretion; and, after wine has been for a few 
months their daily fare, they become more temperate 
than they had ever been in their own country. In 
the same manner, the final and permanent fruits of 
liberty are wisdom, moderation, and mercy. Its im- 
mediate effects are often atrocious crimes, conflicting 
errors, scepticism on points the most clear, dogmatism 
on points the most mysterious. It is just at this crisis 
that its enemies love to exhibit it. They pull down 
the scaffolding from the half-finished edifice; they 
point to the flying dust, the falling bricks, the comfort- 
less rooms, the frightful irregularity of the whole ap- 
pearance; and then ask in scorn where the promised 
splendor and comfort are to be found. If such miser- 
able sophisms were to prevail, there would never be 
a good house or a good government in the world. 

Ariosto tells a pretty story of a fairy, who, by some 
mysterious law of her nature, was condemned to appear 
at certain seasons in the form of a foul and poisonous 
snake. Those who injured her during the period of 
her disguise were forever excluded from participation 
in the blessings which she bestowed. But to those 
who, in spite of her loathsome aspect, pitied and pro- 
tected her, she afterward revealed herself in the beauti- 
ful and celestial form which was natural to her, accom- 
panied their steps, granted all their wishes, filled their 
houses with wealth, made them happy in love and vic- 
torious in war. Such a spirit is Liberty. At times 



46 MACAULAY'S 

she takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, 
she hisses, she stings. But woe to those who in disgust 
shall venture to crush her ! And happy are those 
who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and 
frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in 
the time of her beauty and her glory ! 

There is only one cure for the evils which newly 
acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom. 
When a prisoner first leaves his cell he cannot bear the 
light of day, he is unable to discriminate colors or rec- 
ognize faces. But the remedy is, not to remand him 
into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of 
the sun. The blaze of truth and liberty may at first 
dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half 
blind in the house of bondage. But let them gaze on, 
and they will soon be able to bear it. In a few years 
men learn to reason. The extreme violence of opin- 
ions subsides. Hostile theories correct each other. 
The scattered elements of truth cease to contend, and 
begin to coalesce ; and at length a system of justice and 
order is educed out of the chaos. 

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of lay- 
ing it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people 
ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. 
The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who 
resolved not to go into the water till he had learned 
to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they be- 
come wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait 
forever. 

Therefore it is that we decidedly approve of the 
conduct of Milton and the other wise and good men 
who, in spite of much that was ridiculous and hate- 
ful in the conduct of their associates, stood firmly by 



MILTON. 47 

the cause of public liberty. We are not aware that 
the poet has been charged with personal participation 
in any of the blamable excesses of that time. The fa- 
vorite topic of his enemies is the line of conduct which 
he pursued with regard to the execution of the king. 
Of that celebrated proceeding we by no means ap- 
prove. Still, we must say, in justice to the many emi- 
nent persons who concurred in it, and in justice, more 
particularly, to the eminent person who defended it, 
that nothing can be more absurd than the imputations 
which, for the last hundred and sixty years, it has been 
the fashion to cast upon the regicides. We have, 
throughout, abstained from appealing to first princi- 
ples. We will not appeal to them now. We recur 
again to the parallel case of the Eevolution. What 
essential distinction can be drawn between the execu- 
tion of the father and the deposition of the son ? What 
constitutional maxim is there which applies to the 
former and not to the latter? The king can do no 
wrong. If so, James was as innocent as Charles could 
have been. The minister only ought to be responsible 
for the acts of the sovereign. If so, why not impeach 
Jeffries and retain James? The person of a king is 
sacred. Was the person of James considered sacred at 
the Boyne? To discharge cannon against an army in 
which a king is known to be posted is to approach 
pretty near to regicide. Charles, too, it should always 
be remembered, was put to death by men who had been 
exasperated by the hostilities of several years, and who 
had never been bound to him by any other tie than 
that which was common to them with all their fellow- 
citizens. Those who drove James from his throne, 
who seduced his army, who alienated his friends, who 



48 MACAULAY'S 

first imprisoned him in his palace, and then turned 
him out of it, who broke in upon his very slumbers by 
imperious messages, who pursued him with fire and 
sword from one part of the empire to another, who 
hanged, drew, and quartered liis adherents, and at- 
tainted his innocent heir, were his nephew and his 
two daughters. When we reflect on all these things, 
we are at a loss to conceive how the same persons who, 
on the fifth of November, thank God for wonderfully 
conducting his servant William, and for making all 
opposition fall before him until he became our king 
and governor, can, on the thirtieth of January, con- 
trive to be afraid that the blood of the Eoyal Martyr 
may be visited on themselves and their children. 

We disapprove, we repeat, of the execution of 
Charles ; not because the constitution exempts the king 
from responsibility, for we know that all such maxims, 
however excellent, have their exceptions; nor because 
we feel any peculiar interest in his character, for we 
think that his sentence describes him with perfect jus- 
tice as " a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, and a public 
enemy ; ^' but because we are convinced that the meas- 
ure was most injurious to the cause of freedom. He 
whom it removed was a captive and a hostage ; his heir, 
to whom the allegiance of every Royalist was instantly 
transferred, was at large. The Presbyterians could 
never have been perfectly reconciled to the father; they 
had no such rooted enmity to the son. The great body 
of the people, also, contemplated that proceeding with 
feelings which, however unreasonable, no government 
could safely venture to outrage. 

But though we think the conduct of the regicides 
blamable, that of Milton appears to us in a very differ- 



MILTON. 49 

ent light. The deed was done. It could not be un- 
done. The evil was incurred; and the object was to 
render it as small as possible. We censure the chiefs 
of the army for not yielding to the popular opinion; 
but we cannot censure Milton for wishing to change 
that opinion. The very feeling which would have re- 
strained us from committing the act would have led us, 
after it had been committed, to defend it against the 
ravings of servility and superstition. For the sake of 
public liberty, we wish that the thing had not been 
done, while the people disapproved of it. But, for the 
sake of public liberty, we should also have wished the 
people to approve of it when it was done. If anything 
more were wanting to the justification of Milton, the 
book of Salmasius *^ would furnish it. That miserable 
performance is now with justice considered only as a 
beacon to word-catchers, who wish to become states- 
men. The celebrity of the man who refuted it, the 
" ^neae magni dextra,^^ °^ gives it all its fame with 
the present generation. In that age the state of 
things was different. It was not then fully understood 
how vast an interval separates the mere classical 
scholar from the political philosopher. Nor can it be 
doubted that a treatise which, bearing the name of so 
eminent a critic, attacked the fundamental principles 
of all free governments, must, if suffered to remain un- 
answered, have produced a most pernicious effect on 
the public mind. 

We wish to add a few words relative to another sub- 
ject on which the enemies of Milton delight to dwell — 
his conduct during the administration of the Protector. 
That an enthusiastic votary of liberty should accept 
office under a military usurper seems, no doubt, at first 



50 MACAULAY'S 

sight, extraordinary. But all the circumstances in 
which the country was then placed were extraordinary. 
The ambition of Oliver was of no vulgar kind. He 
never seems to have coveted despotic power. He at 
first fought sincerely and manfully for the Parlia- 
ment, and never deserted it till it had deserted its duty. 
If he dissolved it by force, it was not till he found 
that the few members who remained after so many 
deaths, secessions, and expulsions, were desirous to 
appropriate to themselves a power which they held only 
in trust, and to inflict upon England the curse of a 
Venetian oligarchy. But even when thus placed by 
violence at the head of affairs, he did not assume un- 
limited power. He gave the country a constitution far 
more perfect than any which had at that time been 
known in the world. He reformed the representative 
system in a manner which has extorted praise even 
from Lord Clarendon. For himself he demanded in- 
deed the first place in the commonwealth, but with 
powers scarcely so great as those of a Dutch stadt- 
holder, or an American president. He gave the Par- 
liament a voice in the appointment of ministers, and 
left to it the whole legislative authority, not even re- 
serving to himself a veto on its enactments; and he 
did not require that the chief magistracy should be 
hereditary in his family. Thus far, we think, if the 
circumstances of the time and the opportunities which 
he had of aggrandizing himself be fairly considered, 
he will not lose by comparison with Washington or 
Bolivar. Had his moderation been met by correspond- 
ing moderation, there is no reason to think that he 
would have overstepped the line which he had traced 
for himself. But when he found that his parliaments 



MILTON. 51 

questioned the authority under which they met, and 
that he was in danger of being deprived of the re- 
stricted power wliich was absolutely necessary to his 
personal safety, then, it must be acknowledged, he 
adopted a more arbitrary policy. 

Yet, though we believe that the intentions of Crom- 
well were at first honest, though we believe that he 
was driven from the noble course which he had marked 
out for himself by the almost irresistible force of cir- 
cumstances, though we admire, in common with all 
men of all parties, the ability and energy of his splen- 
did administration, we are not pleading for arbitrary 
and lawless power, even in his hands. We know that 
a good constitution is infinitely better than the best 
despot. But we suspect that, at the time of which' we 
speak, the violence of religious and political enmities 
rendered a stable and happy settlement next to impos- 
sible. The choice lay, not between Cromwell and 
liberty, but between Cromwell and the Stuarts. That 
Milton chose well, no man can doubt who fairly com- 
pares the events of the protectorate with those of the 
thirty years which succeeded it, the darkest and most 
disgraceful in the English annals. Cromwell was evi- 
dently laying, though in an irregular manner, the 
foundations of an admirable system. Never before 
had religious liberty and the freedom of discussion 
been enjoyed in a greater degree. N'ever had the na- 
tional honor been better upheld abroad, or the seat of 
justice better filled at home. And it was rarely that 
any opposition which stopped short of open rebellion 
provoked the resentment of the liberal and magnani- 
mous usurper. The institutions which he had estab- 
lished, as set down in the Instrument of Government, 



52 MACAULAY'S 

and the Humble Petition and Advice, were excellent. 
His practice, it is true, too often departed from the 
theory of these institutions. But had he lived a few 
years longer, it is probable that his institutions would 
have survived him, and that his arbitrary practice 
would have died with him. His power had not been 
consecrated by ancient prejudices. It was upheld only 
by his great personal qualities. Little, therefore, was 
to be dreaded from a second protector, unless he were 
also a second Oliver Cromwell. The events which fol- 
lowed his decease are the most complete vindication of 
those who exerted themselves to uphold his authority. 
His death dissolved the whole frame of society. The 
army rose against the Parliament, the different corps 
of the army against each other. Sect raved against 
sect. Party plotted against party. The Presbyte- 
rians, in their eagerness to be revenged on the Inde- 
pendents, sacrificed their own liberty, and deserted all 
their old principles. Without casting one glance on 
the past, or requiring one stipulation for the future, 
they threw down their freedom at the feet of the most 
frivolous and heartless of tyrants. 

Then came those days, never to be recalled without 
a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sen- 
suality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic 
vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, 
the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. 
The king cringed to his rival that he might trample 
on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pock- 
eted, with complacent infamy, her degrading insults 
and her more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots 
and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the 
state. The government had just ability enough to 



MILTON. 53 

deceive, and just religion enough to persecute. The 
principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning 
courtier, and the Anathema Marantha of every fawn- 
ing dean. In every high place, worship was paid to 
Charles and James, Behial and Moloch; and Eng- 
land propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with 
the blood of her best and bravest children. Crime suc- 
ceeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the 
race accursed of God and man was a second time 
driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, 
and to be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the 
nations. 

Most of the remarks which we have hitherto made 
on the public character of Milton apply to him only as 
one of a large body. We shall proceed to notice some 
of the peculiarities which distinguished him from his 
contemporaries. And, for that purpose, it is neces- 
sary to take a short survey of the parties ^^ into which 
the political world was at that time divided. We must 
premise that our observations are intended to apply 
only to those who adhered, from a sincere preference, 
to one or to the other side. In days of public commo- 
tion, every faction, like an oriental army, is attended 
by a crowd of camp-followers, a useless and heartless 
rabble, who prowl round its line of march in the hope 
of picking up something under its protection, but 
desert it in the day of battle, and often join to exter- 
minate it after a defeat. England, at the time of 
which we are treating, abounded with fickle and selfish 
politicians, who transferred their support to every 
government as it rose; who kissed the hand of the 
king in 1640, and spat in his face in 1649; who 
shouted with equal glee when Cromwell was inaug- 



54 MACAULAY'S 

iirated in Westminster Hall and when he was dug 
np to be hanged at Tyburn; who dined on calves' 
heads/^ or stuck up oak-branches, as circumstances 
altered, without the slightest shame or repugnance. 
These we leave out of the account. We take our esti- 
mate of parties from those who reall}^ deserve to be 
called partisans. 

We would speak first of the Puritans, the most re- 
markable body of men, perhaps, which the world has 
ever produced. The odious and ridiculous parts of 
their character lie on the surface. He that runs may 
read them; nor have there been wanting attentive and 
malicious observers to point them out. For many 
years after the Restoration, they were the theme of un- 
measured invective and derision. They were exposed 
to the utmost licentiousness of the press and of the 
stage, at the time when the press and the stage were 
most licentious. They were not men of letters; they 
were, as a body, unpopular; they could not defend 
themselves ; and the public would not take them under 
its protection. They were therefore abandoned, with- 
out reserve, to the tender mercies of the satirists and 
dramatists. The ostentatious simplicity of their dress, 
their sour aspect, their nasal twang, their stiff pos- 
ture, their long graces, their Hebrew names, the scrip- 
tural phrases which they introduced on every occasion, 
their contempt of human learning, their detestation of 
polite amusements, were indeed fair game for the 
laughers. But it is not from the laughers alone that 
the philosophy of history is to be learned. And he 
who approaches this subject should carefully guard 
against the influence of that potent ridicule which has 
already misled so many excellent writers. 



MILTON. 55 

" Ecco il fonte del riso, ed ecco il rio 
Che mortali perigli in se contiene: 
Hor qui tener a fien nostro desio, 

Ed esser cauti molto a noi eonviene." ^' 

Those who roused the people to resistance; who 
directed their measures through a long series of event- 
ful years; who formed, out of the most unpromising 
materials, the finest army that Europe had ever seen; 
who trampled down king, church, and aristocracy; 
who, in the short intervals of domestic sedition and re- 
bellion, made the name of England terrible to every 
nation on the face of the earth, were no vulgar fa- 
natics. Most of their absurdities were mere external 
badges, like the signs of freemasonry or the dresses 
of friars. We regret that these badges were not more 
attractive. We regret that a body to whose courage 
and talents mankind has owed inestimable obligations 
had not the lofty elegance which distinguished some of 
the adherents of Charles the Eirst, or the easy good- 
breeding for which the court of Charles the Second 
was celebrated. But, if we must make our choice, we 
shall, like Bassanio in the play, turn from the specious 
caskets which contain only the death's head and the 
fool's head, and fix on the plain leaden chest which con- 
ceals the treasure. 

The Puritans were men whose minds had derived 
a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of 
superior beings and eternal interests. Not content 
with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling 
Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to 
the will of the Great Being for whose power nothing 
was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too 
minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, 



56 MACAULAY'S 

was with them the great end of existence. They re- 
jected with contempt the ceremonious homage which 
other sects substituted for the pure worship of the 
soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the 
Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze 
full on his intolerable brightness, and to commune 
with him face to face. Hence originated their con- 
tempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference be- 
tween the greatest and the meanest of mankind seemed 
to vanish when compared with the boundless interval 
which separated the whole race from him on whom 
their own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognized 
no title to superiority but his favor; and, confident of 
that favor, they despised all the accomplishments and 
all the dignities of the world. If they were unac- 
quainted with the works of philosophers and poets, 
they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their 
names were not found in the registers of heralds, they 
were recorded in the Book of Life. If their steps 
were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, 
legions of ministering angels had charge over them. 
Their palaces were houses not made with hands, their 
diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away. 
On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests, 
they looked down with contempt; for they esteemed 
themselves rich in a more precious treasure, and elo- 
quent in a more sublime language, nobles by the 
right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposi- 
tion of a mightier hand. The very meanest of them 
was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible 
importance belonged ; on whose slightest action the 
spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious in- 
terest ; who had been destined, before heaven and earth 



MILTON. 57 

were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue 
when heaven and earth should have passed away. 
Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to 
earthly causes had been ordained on his account. For 
his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. 
For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his will by 
the pen of the evangelist and the harp of the prophet. 
He had been wrested by no common deliverer from 
the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed 
by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no 
earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been 
darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead 
had risen, that all nature had shuddered at the suf- 
ferings of her expiring God. 

Thus the Puritan was made up of two different 
men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, 
passion, the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. 
He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker; 
but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his de- 
votional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and 
groans, and tears. He was half maddened by glorious 
or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or 
the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam 
of the Beatific Vision, or woke, screaming, from 
dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought 
himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial 
year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his 
soul that God had hidden his face from him. But 
when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his 
sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul 
had left no perceptible trace behind them. People 
who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth vis- 
ages, and heard nothing from them but their groans 



58 MACAULAY'S 

and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But 
those had little reason to laugh who encountered them 
in the hall of debate or in the field of battle. These 
fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a cool- 
ness of judgment and an immutability of purpose 
which some writers have thought inconsistent with 
their religious zeal, but which were in fact the neces- 
sary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on 
one subject made them tranquil on every other. One 
overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity 
and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its ter- 
rors and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles 
and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but 
not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had 
made them stoics, had cleared their minds from every 
vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above 
the influence of danger and of corruption. It some- 
times might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never 
to choose unwise means. They went through the 
world, like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus ^* with his 
flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, min- 
gling with human beings, but having neither part nor 
lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleas- 
ure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not 
to be withstood by any barrier. 

Such we believe to have been the character of the 
Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their man- 
ners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic 
habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds 
was often injured by straining after things too high 
for mortal reach; and we know that, in spite of their 
hatred of popery, they too often fell into the worst 
vices of that bad svstem, intolerance and extravao^ant 



MILTOJs". 69 

austerity, that they had their anchorites and their 
crusades, their Dunstans and their De Montforts, their 
Dominies and their Escobars. Yet, when all circum- 
stances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate 
to pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a 
useful body. 

The Puritans espoused the cause of civil liberty 
mainly because it was the cause of religion. There 
was another party, by no means numerous, but distin- 
guished by learning and ability, which acted with 
them on very different principles. We speak of those 
whom Cromwell was accustomed to call the Heathens, 
men who were, in the phraseology of that time, doubt- 
ing Thom-ases or careless Gallios with regard to re- 
ligious subjects, but passionate worshippers of free- 
dom. Heated by the study of ancient literature, they 
set up their country as their idol, and proposed to 
themselves the heroes of Plutarch as their examples. 
They seem to have borne some resemblance to the Bris- 
sotines of the French Eevolution. But it is not very 
easy to draw the line of distinction between them and 
their devout associates, whose tone and manner they 
sometimes found it convenient to affect, and some- 
times, it is probable, imperceptibly adopted. 

We now come to the Eoyalists. We shall attempt 
to speak of them, as we have spoken of their antago- 
nists, with perfect candor. We shall not charge upon 
a whole party the profligacy and baseness of the horse- 
boys, gamblers, and bravoes, whom the hope of license 
and plunder attracted from all the dens of Whitefriars 
to the standard of Charles, and who disgraced their as- 
sociates by excesses which, under the stricter discipline 
of the Parliamentary armies, were never tolerated. 
6 



CO MACAULAY'S 

We will select a more favorable specimen. Thinking 
as we do that the cause of the king was the cause of 
bigotry and tyranny, we yet cannot refrain from look- 
ing with complacency on the character of the honest 
old Cavaliers. We feel a national pride in comparing 
them with the instruments which the despots of other 
countries are compelled to employ, with the mutes 
who throng their antechambers, and the Janizaries who 
mount guard at their gates. Our Royalist country- 
men were not heartless, dangling courtiers, bowing at 
every step, and simpering at every word. They were 
not mere machines for destruction, dressed up in uni- 
forms, caned into skill, intoxicated into valor, defend- 
ing without love, destroying without hatred. There 
was a freedom in their subserviency, a nobleness in 
their very degradation. The sentiment of individual 
independence was strong within them. They were in- 
deed misled, but by no base or selfish motive. Com- 
passion and romantic honor, the prejudices of child- 
hood, and the venerable names of history, threw over 
them a spell potent as that of Duessa; and, like the 
Red-cross Knight, they thought that they were doing 
battle for an injured beauty, while they defended a 
false and loathsome sorceress. In truth, they scarcely 
entered at all into the merits of the political question. 
It was not for a treacherous king or an intolerant 
church that they fought, but for the old banner whicli 
had waved in so many battles over the heads of their 
fathers, and for the altars at which they had received 
the hands of their brides. Though nothing could be 
more erroneous than their political opinions, they pos- 
sessed, in a far greater degree than their adversaries, 
those qualities which are the grace of private life. 



MILTON. 61 

With many of the vices of the Round Table, they had 
also many of its virtues, courtesy, generosity, veracity, 
tenderness, and respect for wom.en. They had far 
more both of profound and of polite learning than the 
Puritans. Their manners were more engaging, their 
tempers more amiable, their tastes more elegant, and 
their households more cheerful. 

Milton did not strictly belong to any of the classes 
which we have described. He was not a Puritan. He 
was not a freethinker. He was not a Royalist. In his 
character the noblest qualities of every party were com- 
bined in harmonious union. From the Parliament and 
from the court, from the conventicle and from the 
Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral cir- 
cles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel 
of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew 
to itself whatever was great and good, while it re- 
jected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which 
those finer elements were defiled. Like the Puritans, 
he lived, 

" As ever in his great taskmaster's eye." ^^ 
Like them, he kept his mind continually fixed on an 
Almighty Judge and an eternal reward. And hence he 
acquired their contempt of external circumstances, 
their fortitude, their tranquillity, their inflexible reso- 
lution. But not the coolest sceptic or the most pro- 
fane scoffer was more perfectly free from the contagion 
of their frantic delusions, their savage manners, their 
ludicrous jargon, their scorn of science, and their aver- 
sion to pleasure. Hating tyranny with a perfect 
hatred, he had nevertheless all the estimable and orna- 
mental qualities which were almost entirely monopo- 
lized by the party of the tyrant. There was none who 



62 MACAULAY'S 

had a stronger sense of the value of literature, a finer 
relish for every elegant amusement, or a more chival- 
rous delicacy of honor and love. Though his opinions 
were democratic, his tastes and his associations were 
such as harmonize best with monarchy and aristocracy. 
He was under the influence of all the feelings by which 
the gallant Cavaliers were misled. But of those feel- 
ings he was the master, and not the slave. Like the 
hero of Homer, he enjoyed all the pleasures of fascina- 
tion; but he was not fascinated. He listened to the 
song of the Sirens; yet he glided by without being 
seduced to their fatal shore. He tasted the cup of 
Circe; but he bore about him a sure antidote against 
the effects of its bewitching sweetness. The illusions 
which captivated his imagination never impaired his 
reasoning powers. The statesman was proof against 
the splendor, the solemnity, and the romance which 
enchanted the poet. Any person who will contrast the 
sentiments expressed in his treatises on Prelacy with 
the exquisite lines on ecclesiastical architecture and 
music in the Penseroso, which was published about the 
same time, will understand our meaning. This is an 
inconsistency which, more than anything else, raises 
his character in our estimation, because it shows how 
many private tastes and feelings he sacrificed, in order 
to do what he considered his duty to mankind. It is 
the very struggle of the noble Othello. His heart re- 
lents, but his hand is firm. He does naught in hate, 
but all in honor. He kisses the beautiful deceiver be- 
fore he destroys her. 

That from which the public character of Milton de-. 
rives its great and peculiar splendor still remains to 
be mentioned. If he exerted himself to overthrow a 



MILTON. 63 

forsworn king and a persecuting hierarchy, he exerted 
himself in conjunction with others. But the glory 
of the battle which he fought for the species of 
freedom which is the most valuable, and which was 
then the least understood, the freedom of the hu- 
man mind, is all his own. Thousands and tens of 
thousands among his contemporaries raised their 
voices against ship-money and the Star-chamber. But 
there were few indeed who discerned the more fearful 
evils of moral and intellectual slavery, and the benefits 
which would result from the liberty of the press and 
the unfettered exercise of private judgment. These 
were the objects which Milton justly conceived to be 
the most important. He was desirous that the people 
should think for themselves as well as tax themselves, 
and should be emancipated from the dominion of 
prejudice as well as from that of Charles. He knew 
that those who, with the best intentions, overlooked 
these schemes of reform, and contented themselves 
with pulling down the king and imprisoning the ma- 
lignants, acted like the heedless brothers in his own 
poem, who, in their eagerness to disperse the train of 
the sorcerer, neglected the means of liberating the cap- 
tive. They thought only of conquering when they 
should have thought of disenchanting. 

" Oil, ye mistook! Ye should have snatched his wand 
And bound him fast. Without the rod reversed. 
And backward mutters of dissevering power, 
We cannot free the lady that sits here 
In stony fetters fixed and motionless.'"^ 

To reverse the rod, to spell the charm backward, to 
break the ties which bound a stupefied people to the 
seat of enchantment, was the noble aim of Milton. To 



64 MACAULAY'S 

this all his public conduct was directed. For this he 
joined the Presbyterians; for this he forsook them. 
He fought their perilous battle; but he turned away 
with disdain from their insolent triumph. He saw 
that they, like those whom they had vanquished, were 
hostile to the liberty of thought. He therefore joined 
the Independents, and called upon Cromwell to break 
the secular chain, and to save free conscience from the 
paw of the Presbyterian wolf. With a view to the 
same great object, he attacked the licensing system, 
in that sublime treatise which every st^atesman should 
wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between 
his eyes. His attacks were, in general, directed less 
against particular abuses than against those deeply 
seated errors on which almost all abuses are founded, 
the servile worship of eminent men and the irrational 
dread of innovation. 

That he might shake the foundations of these de- 
basing sentiments more effectually, he always selected 
for himself the boldest literary services. He never 
came up in the rear, when the outworks had been car- 
ried and the breach entered. He pressed into the 
forlorn hope. At the beginning of the changes, he 
wrote with incomparable energy and eloquence against 
the bishops. But when his opinion seemed likely to 
prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned 
prelacy to the crowd of writers who now hastened to 
insult a falling party. There is no more hazardous 
enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into 
those dark and infected recesses in which no light has 
ever shone. But it was the choice and the pleasure of 
Milton to penetrate the noisome vapors, and to brave 
the terrible explosion. Those who most disapprove of 



MILTON. 65 

his opinions must respect the hardihood with which he 
maintained them. He, in general, left to others the 
credit of expounding and defending the popular parts 
of his religious and political creed. He took his own 
stand upon those which the great body of his country- 
men reprobated as criminal, or derided as paradoxical. 
He stood up for divorce and regicide. He attacked 
the prevailing sytems of education. His radiant and 
beneficent career resembled that of the god of light and 
fertility. 

" Nitor in adversum ; nee me, qui csetera; vincit 
Impetus, et rapido contrarius evehor orbi." " 

It is to be regretted that the prose writings of 
Milton should, in our time, be so little read. As com- 
positions, they deserve the attention of every man 
who wishes to become acquainted with the full power 
of the English language. They abound with passages 
compared with which the finest declamations of Burke 
sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of 
cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous em- 
broidery. Not even in the earlier books of the Para- 
dise Lost has the great poet ever risen higher than in 
those parts of his controversial works in which his 
feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of 
devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own 
majestic language, " a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs 
and harping symphonies." °^ 

We had intended to look more closely at these per- 
formances, to analyse the peculiarities of the diction, 
to dwell at some length on the sublime wisdom of the 
Areopagitica and the nervous rhetoric of the Icono- 
clast, and to point out some of those magnificent pas- 
sages which occur in the Treatise of Eeformation, 



ee MACAULAY'S 

and the Animadversions on the Eemonstrant. But 
the length to which our remarks have already extended 
renders this impossible. 

We must conclude. And yet we can scarcely tear 
ourselves away from the subject. The days immedi- 
ately following the publication of this relic of Milton 
appear to be peculiarly set apart, and consecrated to 
his memory. And we shall scarcely be censured if, 
on this his festival, we be found lingering near his 
shrine, how worthless soever may be the offering which 
we bring to it. While this book lies on our table, we 
seem to be contemporaries of the writer. We are 
transported a hundred and fifty years back. We can 
almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small 
lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ be- 
neath the faded green hangings ; that we can catch the 
quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the 
day ; that we are reading in the lines of his noble coun- 
tenance the proud and mournful history of his glory 
and his affliction. We image to ourselves the breath- 
less silence in which we should listen to his slightest 
word, the passionate veneration with which we should 
kneel to kiss his hand and weep upon it, the earnest- 
ness with which we should endeavor to console him, 
if indeed such a spirit could need consolation, for the 
neglect of an age unworthy of his talents and his 
virtues, the eagerness with which we should contest 
with his daughters, or with his Quaker friend Elwood, 
the privilege of reading Homer to him, or of taking 
down the immortal accents which flowed from his lips. 
These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet we cannot 
be ashamed of them ; nor shall we be sorry if what we 
have written shall in any degree excite them in other 



MILTON. 6Y 

minds. We are not much in the habit of idolizing 
either the living or the dead ; and we think that there 
is no more certain indication of a weak and ill-regu- 
lated intellect than that propensity which, for want of 
a better name, we will venture to christen Boswellism. 
But there are a few characters which have stood the 
closest scrutiny and the severest tests, which have been 
tried in the furnace and have proved pure, which have 
been weighed in the balance and have not been found 
wanting, which have been declared sterling by the 
general consent of mankind, and which are visibly 
stamped with the image and superscription of the 
Most High. These great men we trust that we know 
how to prize ; and of these was Milton. The sight of 
his books, the sound of his name, are pleasant to us. 
His thoughts resemble those celestial fruits and flowers 
which the Virgin Martyr of Massinger sent down from 
the gardens of paradise to the earth, and which were 
distinguished from the productions of other soils, not 
only by superior bloom and sweetness, but by miracu- 
lous efficacy to invigorate and to heal. They are pow- 
erful, not only to delight but to elevate and purify. 
Nor do we envy the man who can study either the life 
or the writings of the great poet and patriot without 
aspiring to emulate, not indeed the sublime works with 
which his genius has enriched our literature, but the 
zeal with which he labored for the public good, the 
fortitude with which he endured every private calam- 
ity, the lofty disdain with which he looked down on 
temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred which he 
bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so 
sternly kept with his country and with his fame. 



68 MACAULAY'S 



NOTES. 

^ This essay originally appeared in the Edinburgh Eeview 
for August, 1825, as a review article of Milton's posthumous 
Treatise on Christian Doctrine, which had just appeared. 

* Mr. Robert Lemon is held in grateful remembrance by 
antiquarians and historians for his indefatigable industry in 
overhauling, indexing, and rendering accessible a vast accu- 
mulation of state papers. Many valuable documents were un- 
earthed. Scott, among others, acknowledges his indebted- 
ness for correspondence relative to Rob Roy. 

^Milton filled the position of foreign secretary. He drew 
up Cromwell's foreign despatches in Latin, which was at that 
time the diplomatic language of Europe. Latin was displaced 
by French, and indications are not wanting that French will 
in turn be displaced first by several languages concurrently, 
and finally by English, which is already the commercial lan- 
guage of the world. 

* It appears from later sources, unknown to Macaulay, that 
the manuscript was in preparation for printing at the time of 
Milton's death, and was left in the hands of Daniel Skinner, 
a nephew of Cyriac, who arranged for its publication by 
Daniel Elzevir of Amsterdam. Elzevir was alarmed by the 
contents, and fearing the resentment of the English govern- 
ment, consulted the English authorities, by whom the manu- 
script was demanded and, as we have seen, consigned to the 
oblivion of the British archives until recovered by Deputy 
Keeper Lemon in 1823. 

'* As a student in the University of Oxford, Macaulay is 
said to have disliked the preparation of Latin essays. His 
opinion of Latin composition, in which he won no honors, may 
be inferred from this passage. 

® From Milton's eleventh Sonnet. Quintilian was a cele- 
brated teacher of rhetoric at Rome. Died 96 A. D. 
^ " To him no author was unknown, 
Yet what he wrote was all his own; 
Horace's wit and Virgil's state 
He did not steal, but emulate; 



MILTON. 60 

And when he would, like them, appear. 
Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear." 

— Denham. 

^ Arianism is the doctrine that the Son is like unto but 
not equal to the Father. As opposed to the Trinity, its logical 
outcome is Unitarianism. 

" Milton contended that plurality of wives, no matter how 
unwise, was sanctioned by the Old Testament, and that polyg- 
amy could not be regarded as a crime like theft or murder. 

^•^ Civilised and civilisation are the English spellings fol- 
lowed by Macaulay. 

" Macaulay's words are plural, but his meaning is singular. 
He means Samuel Johnson, whose peevish sketch of Milton in 
Lives of the English Poets is fitly characterized in this para- 
graph. 

" Reference is made to Homer. 

" Paradise Lost, Book ix, 44. 

"On the contrary, Johnson is exceedingly deft. 

^^ This is one of Macaulay's most famous sentences, and it 
has been the theme of many a sophomoric thesis. Two quota- 
tions will indicate the handling Macaulay has had at the 
hands of critics. In a paper on Burns, contributed to the 
same quarterly three years later, Carlyle comes at Macaulay 
in this fashion: 

" But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the 
poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted that he should have 
been born two centuries ago, inasmuch as poetry about that 
date vanished from the earth and became no longer attain- 
able by men! Such cobweb speculations have now and then 
overhung the field of literature, but they obstruct not the 
growth of any plant there; the Shakespeare or the Burns, un- 
consciously, and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes 
them away." 

Sidney Lanier, in his lectures to the students of Johns 
Hopkins in 1881, since published in book form under the title 
The English Novel (see p. 45), concludes an examination of 
the same thought as follows: "And so, away with this folly: 
science, instead of being the enemy of poetry, is its quarter- 
master and commissary — it forever purveys for poetry; and 



^0 MACAULAY'S 

just so much more as it shall bring man into contact with na- 
ture, just so much more large and intense and rich will be the 
poetry of the future in its content, just so much finer and 
more abundant in its forms." 

^° A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act v, i, 14. 

^' Wordsworth and his followers. 

^® The student should read Johnson's article on Milton. 
The flavor of Macaulay's essay is lost unless it be read as a 
refutation of Johnson. For Macaulay's extended opinion of 
Johnson see his essay on that remarkable personage. 

^®When in Italy Milton was courteously received by Mar- 
quis Manso, the literary patron of Tasso. 

^^ Paradise Lost, iv, 551-554. 

" For the best idea of Homer to be had in an English trans- 
lation, see Professor Palmer's Odyssey. 

" Consult Milton's eighth Sonnet. 

^^ A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act iv, i. 

^* The masque is an outdoor performance, comprising music, 
singing, recitation, and dancing; the predecessor of the mod- 
ern opera. It was a popular form of entertainment in the 
days of Queen Bess. 

^ The Faithful Shepherdess, London, 1609, by John Fletch- 
er; the Aminta, Ferrara, 1573, by Tasso; and the Pastor 
Fido, Turin, 1583, by Guarini, are the predecessors of the Co- 
mus, Ludlow Castle, 1634, by Milton. Comus was written by 
Milton, two years after he had left the University of Cam- 
bridge, for the Earl of Bridgewater's household, by whom it 
was presented. 

^^The annual gala-day of the chimney-sweepers of Lon- 
don, in imitation of rural festivities. 

^^A herdsman in the Idylls of Theocritus; a shepherd in 
the Eclogues of Virgil; in later literature, a rustic or shep- 
herd. — Century Cyclopedia of Names. 

^« Comus, 1012, 1013. 

^^ The hieroglyphics of Egypt were an approach to a crude 
alphabet of many characters, except that a single character 
might stand for a syllable or for an entire word. The Phoeni- 
cians derived their alphabet from the Egyptians, whence the 
Greek, then the Roman, which we use. The Mexican picture- 



MILTON. 71 

writing is, like that of the North American Indians, simply 
rude pictorial representation. The Egyptians represented 
sounds, that is to say words, intelligible only to the versed; 
the Mexicans represented objects readily understood by the 
illiterate passer-by. 

^'^ The student should not feel discouraged because unable 
to read Dante in the original. Here are two notes : 

" A warm admirer of Robert Hall, Macaulay heard with 
pride how the great preacher, then well-nigh worn out with 
that long disease, his life, was discovered lying on the floor, 
employed in learning, by aid of grammar and dictionary, 
enough Italian to enable him to verify the parallel between 
Milton and Dante." — Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord 
Macaulay, \, 117. 

*' Poor Robert Hall, . . . Alas! even had his life been pro- 
longed, like Hezekiah's, he could not have verilied it, for it is 
unverifiable." — Matthew Arnold, Mixed Essays. 

^^ Amadis of Gaul, a legendary hero, like Prince Arthur, 
the centre of a cycle of romances in prose and verse. 

^^ A district of London on the right bank of the Thames. 

^^ Johnson again. The following from Johnson's Lives of 
the Poets is in part what Macaulay is aiming at: 

" Another inconvenience of Milton's design is that it re- 
quires the description of what cannot be described — the agency 
of spirits. He saw that immateriality supplied no images, and 
that he could not show angels acting but by instruments of 
action; he therefore invested them with form and matter. 
This, being necessary, was therefore defensible; and he should 
have secured the consistency of his system by keeping imma- 
teriality out of sight, and enticing his reader to drop it from 
his thoughts. But he has unhappily perplexed his poetry 
with his philosophy. His infernal and celestial powers are 
sometimes pure spirit, and sometimes animated body. When 
Satan walks with his lance upon the burning marl, he has a 
body; when, in his passage between hell and the new world, 
he is in danger of sinking in the vacuity, and is supported by 
a gust of rising vapors, he has a body; when he animates 
the toad, he seems to be a mere spirit that can penetrate mat- 
ter at pleasure; when he starts up in his own shape, he has 
at least a determined form; and when he is brought before 



Y2 MACAULAY'S 

Gabriel, he has a spear and a shield, which he had the power 
of hiding in the toad, though the arms of the contending 
angels are evidently material. The vulgar inhabitants of Pan- 
daemonium, being incorporal spirits, are at large, though with- 
out number, in a limited space; yet in a battle, when they 
were overwhelmed by mountains, their armor hurt them, 
crushed in upon their substance, noAV grown gross by sin- 
ning. . . . The confusion of spirit and matter which pervades 
the whole narration of the war of heaven fills it with incon- 
gruity; and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the 
favorite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is 
increased." 

^* Modern scholarship rejects this statement as to the 
Greeks. 

^^ See Gibbon's Roman Empire, xv. Succinctly stated, 
Gibbon's causes are: I. The intolerant zeal of the Christians, 
II. The doctrine of a future life. III. The miraculous powers 
ascribed to the primitive church. IV. The pure and austere 
morals of the Christians. V. The efficient organization of the 
church on the plan of a republic. 

'" " Substantial meaning such lucubrations have none," 
says Matthew Arnold with reference to this and preceding sen- 
tences. 

"Job X, 22. 

^ The English Revolution. 

''The student will do well to weigh the corresponding sen- 
tence from Johnson: "What we know of Milton's character 
in domestic relations is that he was severe and arbitrary. His 
family consisted of women; and there appears in his books 
something like a Turkish contempt of females as subordinate 
and inferior beings." 

*° Katharine Woodcock, his second wife. Sonnet xxiii. The 
other sonnets may also be identified with some degree of 
certitvide. 

*^ " The Sonnets were written in different parts of Milton's 
life upon difTerent occasions. They deserve not any particular 
criticism ; for of the best it can only be said that they are not 
bad; and perhaps only the eighth and the twenty-first are 
truly entitled to this slender commendation." — Johnson. 



MILTON. 73 

" Stately, rugged, or graceful, as he pleased to make them ; 
some with solemn grandeur of Hebrew psalms, others having 
the classic ease of Horace, some of his own tenderness, they 
are true, unlike those of Shakespeare and Spenser, to the cor- 
rect form of this difficult form of poetry." — Stopford A. 
Brooke. 

*^ The conflicting Zoroastrian divinities of light and dark- 
ness. 

" A disinterested reader, whose object is not to hear Puri- 
tanism and Milton glorified, but to get at the truth about 
them, will surely be satisfied. With what a heavy brush, 
he will say to himself, does this man lay on his colors! The 
Puritans Oromasdes, and the Royalists Arimanes? , . . Not 
at all a conflict between Oromasdes and Arimanes, but a good 
deal of Arimanes on both sides." — Arnold, A French Critic on 
Milton. 

*' The- war of Grecian Independence was in progress when 
Macaulay wrote. 

**See the Spectator, No. 11. 

*^rar from being a bigoted Protestant, Macaulay, though 
not yet a member of Parliament, here scores the opponents of 
the Catholic Emancipation Act, then pending, which was 
finally passed in 1829, rendering Catholics eligible to offices of 
trust and distinction, 

^® Paradise Lost, i, 164, 165. Macaulay changes Milton's 
wording slightly. Satan is speaking in the first person, and 
is represented by Milton as saying, " Our labor," etc. 

" A French phrase from Norman times, signifying " the 
King approves." It was affixed by the king to such acts as 
received the royal assent. 

*'^ A town in Andalusia near Cadiz, famous for its wiiie, 
called sherry from the name of the place where it was pro- 
duced. Macaulay appears to be under the impression that 
Xeres is the name of a river. 

*' " King Charles the Second, being now sheltered in Hol- 
land, employed Salmasius, professor of polite learning at Ley- 
den, to M'rite a defence of his father and of monarchy; and, 
to excite his industry, gave him, as was reported, a hundred 
Jacobuses. Salmasius was a man of skill in languages, knowl- 



74 MACAULAY'S 

edge of antiquity, and sagacity of emendatory criticism al- 
most exceeding all hope of human attainment ; and having, by 
excessive praises, been confirmed in great confidence of him- 
self, though he probably had not much considered the prin- 
ciples of society or the rights of government, undertook the 
employment \vithout distrust of his own qualifications, and, 
as his expedition in writing was wonderful, in 1649 published 
Defensio Regis. To this Milton was required to write a suf- 
ficient answer, which he performed (1C51) in such a manner 
that Hobbes declared himself unable to decide whose language 
was the best, or whose arguments were worse. In my opin- 
ion, Milton's periods are smoother, neater, and more pointed; 
but he delights himself with teasing his adversary as much as 
with confuting him. ]Milton when he undertook this answer 
was weak of body and dim of sight ; but his will was forward, 
and what was wanting of health was supplied by zeal. He 
was rewarded by a thousand pounds, and this book was much 
read; for paradox, recommended by spirit and elegance, easily 
commands attention, and he who told every man that he 
was equal to his King could scarcely want an audience." — 
Johnson, Lives of the Poets. 

^^'By the right hand of the great .Eneas." — Virgil's 
^Eneas, x, 830. Said proverbially of an insignificant person 
who meets his fate at the hand of a famous one. 

" The paragraphs which follow are in Macaulay's best vein. 
Note how he first clears the way, and then proceeds to color 
his parties one by one. Saintsbury says: "On any subject 
which Macaulay has touched his survey is unsurpassable for 
giving a bird's-eye view, and for creating interest on the 
matter. . . . You need not — you had much better not — pin 
your faith on his details, but his Pisgah sights are ad- 
mirable."' 

" Calves' Head Clubs dined in derision of Charles I. The 
oak branch or a sprig of oak in the hat was the emblem of a 
Royalist. — See Chambers's Book of Days, 1, pp. 192 and 693. 

"Thurber translates as follows: "Here is the fount of 
laughter; here is the stream which contains in itself the dead- 
ly perils; here now it behooves us to keep our desire in check 
and to be very cautious." — Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, iv, 57. 



MILTON. Y5 

" See Faerie Queen : Sir Artegal is the personification of 
Justice. 

"See Milton's seventh Sonnet, celebrating his having ar- 
rived at the age of twenty-three, 

''See Comus, 815-819. 

"Ovid, Metamorphoses, ii, 72, 73, spoken of the sun: "I 
strive against opposition nor does the force that overcomes all 
else subdue me; I course against the swiftly moving heavens." 

^ " As a literary critic Macaulay is far from impeccable. 
His sympathies were not very wide, and they were apt to be 
conditioned by attractions and repulsions quite other than 
literary. ... I feel morally certain he could not have been 
the Miltonian that he was if Milton had been a Cavalier and 
a Churchman." — Saintsbury. 

" The phrases are mere rhetoric. Macaulay's writing 
passes for being admirably clear, and so externally it is; but 
often it is really obscure, if one takes his deliverances and 
tries to find in them a definite meaning. However, there is a 
multitude of readers, doubtless, for whom it is sufficient to 
have their ears tickled with fine rhetoric, but the tickling 
makes the serious reader impatient." — Arnold. 

Mr. Arnold writes from the side of the critic. Macaulay 
wrote as one who would not only rescue Milton from obloquy, 
but set him on a pedestal as one of England's greatest men. 
Let others coolly criticise; we would not desire Macaulay to 
abate one word of what he has written. 



\^ 



THE LIFE AI^D WEITIlsTOS 
OF ADDISOK' 



Some reviewers are of opinion that a lady who 
dares to publish a book renounces by that act the fran- 
chises appertaining to her sex, and can claim no ex- 
emption from the utmost rigor of critical procedure. 
From that opinion we dissent. We admit, indeed, 
that in a country which boasts of many female writers, 
eminently qualified by their talents and acquirements 
to influence the public mind, it would be of most per- 
nicious consequence that inaccurate history or unsound 
philosophy should be suffered to pass uncensured, 
merely because the offender chanced to be a lady. But 
we conceive that, on such occasions, a critic would do 
well to imitate the courteous knight who found himself 
compelled by duty to keep the lists against Brada- 
mante. He, we are told, defended successfully the 
cause of which he was the champion; but, before the 
fight began, exchanged Balisarda for a less deadly 
sword, of which he carefully blunted the point and 
edge.* 

Nor are the immunities of sex the only immunities 
which Miss Aikin may rightfully plead. Several of 

* Orlando Furioso, xlv, C8. 

77 



78 MACAULAY'S 

her works^ and especially the very pleasing Memoirs of 
the Eeign of James the First, have fully entitled her to 
the privileges enjoyed by good writers. One of those 
privileges we hold to be this, that such writers, when, 
either from the unlucky choice of a subject, or from 
the indolence too often produced by success, they hap- 
pen to fail, shall not be subjected to the severe disci- 
pline which it is sometimes necessary to inflict upon 
dunces and impostors, but shall merely be reminded by 
a gentle touch, like that with which the Laputan ^ flap- 
per roused his dreaming lord, that it is high time to 
wake. 

Our readers will probably infer from what we have 
said that Miss Aikin's book has disappointed ^ us. The 
truth is that she is not well acquainted with her subject. 
No person who is not familiar with the political and 
literary history of England during the reigns of Wil- 
liam the Third, of Anne, and of George the First, can 
possibly write a good life of Addison. Now, we m.ean 
no reproach to Miss Aikin, and many will think that 
we pay her a compliment when we say that her studies 
have taken a different direction. She is better ac- 
quainted with Shakespeare and Raleigh than with Con- 
greve and Prior; and is far more at home among the 
ruffs and peaked beards of Theobald's ^ than among 
the Steenkirks ^ and flowing periwigs which surround- 
ed Queen Anne's tea-table at Hampton. She seems to 
have written about the Elizabethan Age because she 
had read much about it ; she seems, on the other hand, 
to have read a little about the age of Addison because 
she had determined to write about it. The consequence 
is that she has had to "describe men and things without 
having either a correct or a vivid idea of them, and that 



ADDISON. Y9 

she has often fallen into errors of a very serious kind. 
The reputation which Miss Aikin has justly earned 
stands so high, and the charm of Addison's letters is 
so great, that a second edition of this work may prob- 
ably be required. If so, we hope that every paragraph 
will be revised, and that every date and fact about 
which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully 
verified. 

To Addison himself we are bound by a sentiment 
as much like affection as any sentiment can be, which 
is inspired by one who has been sleeping a hundred and 
twenty years in Westminster Abbey. We trust, how- 
ever, that this feeling will not betray us into that abject 
idolatry which we have often had occasion to repre- 
hend in others, and which seldom fails to make both 
the idolater and the idol ridiculous. A man of genius 
and virtue is but a man. x\ll his powers cannot be 
equally developed, nor can we expect from him perfect 
self-knowledge. We need not, therefore, hesitate to 
admit that Addison has left us some compositions 
which do not rise above mediocrity, some heroic poems 
hardly equal to Parn ell's, some criticism as superficial 
as Dr. Blair's, and a tragedy not very much better than 
Dr. Johnson's. It is praise enough to say of a writer 
that, in a high department of literature, in which many 
eminent writers have distinguished themselves, he has 
had no equal ; and this may with strict justice be said 
of Addison. 

As a man, he may not have deserved the adoration 
which he received from those who, bewitched by his 
fascinating society, and indebted for all the comforts 
of life to his generous and delicate friendship, wor- 
shipped him nightly in his favorite temple at But- 



80 MACAULAY'S 

ton's.® But, after full inquiry and impartial reflection, 
we have long been convinced that he deserved as much 
love and esteem as can be justly claimed by any of 
our infirm and erring race. Some blemishes may un- 
doubtedly be detected in his character; but the more 
carefully it is examined, the more will it appear, to use 
the phrase of the old anatomists, sound in the noble 
parts, free from all taint of perfidy, of cowardice, of 
cruelty, of ingratitude, of envy. Men may easily be 
named in whom some particular good disposition has 
been more conspicuous than in Addison. But the Just 
harmony of qualities, the exact temper between the 
stern and the humane virtues, the habitual observance 
of every law, not only of moral rectitude, but of moral 
grace and dignity, distinguish him from all men who 
have been tried by equally strong temptations, and 
about whose conduct we possess equally full infor- 
mation. 

His father was the Reverend Lancelot Addison, 
who, though eclipsed by his more celebrated son, made 
some figure in the world, and occupies with credit 
two folio pages in the Biographia Britannica. Lan- 
celot was sent up, as a poor scholar, from Westmore- 
land to Queen's College, Oxford, in the time of the 
Commonwealth, made some progress in learning, be- 
came, like most of his fellow-students, a violent Eoyal- 
ist, lampooned the heads of the university, and was 
forced to ask pardon on his bended knees. When he 
had left college, he earned a humble subsistence by 
reading the liturgy of the fallen Church to the families 
of those sturdy squires whose manor-houses were scat- 
tered over the wild of Sussex. After the Restoration 
his loyalty was rewarded with the post of chaplain to 



ADDISON. 81 

the garrison of Dunkirk. When Dunkirk was sold to 
France, he lost his employment. But Tangier had 
been ceded by Portugal to England as part of the mar- 
riage portion of the Infanta Catharine, and to Tangier 
Lancelot Addison was sent. A more miserable situ- 
ation can hardly be conceived. It was difficult to say 
whether the unfortunate settlers were more tormented 
by the heats or by the rains, by the soldiers within the 
wall or by the Moors without it. One advantage the 
chaplain had. He enjoyed an excellent opportunity 
of studying the history and manners of Jews and Mo- 
hammedans, and of this opportunity he appears to have 
made excellent use. On his return to England, after 
some years of banishment, he published an interesting 
volume on the Polity and Keligion of Barbary, and 
another on the Hebrew Customs and the State of Eab- 
binical Learning. He rose to eminence in his profes- 
sion and became one of the royal chaplains, a Doctor of 
Divinity, Archdeacon of Salisbury, and Dean of Lich- 
field. It is said that he would have been made a 
bishop after the Eevolution if he had not given offence 
to the Government by strenuously opposing, in the 
Convocation of 1689, the liberal policy of William and 
Tillotson. 

In 1672, not long after Dr. Addison's return from 
Tangier, his son Joseph was born. Of Joseph's child- 
hood we know little. He learned his rudiments at 
schools in his father's neighborhood, and was then sent 
to the Charier House. "^ The anecdotes which are popu- 
larly related about his boyish tricks do not harmonize 
very well with what we know of his riper years. There 
remains a tradition that he was the ringleader in a 
barring out, and another tradition that he ran away 



82 MACAULAY'S 

from school and hid himself in a wood, where he fed 
on berries and slept in a hollow tree, till after a long 
search he was discovered and brought home. If these 
stories be true, it would be curious to know by what 
moral discipline so mutinous and enterprising a lad 
was transformed into the gentlest and most modest of 
men. 

We have abundant proof that, whatever Joseph's 
pranks may have been, he pursued his studies vigor- 
ously and successfully. At fifteen he was not only fit 
for the university, but carried thither a classical taste 
and a stock of learning which would have done honor 
to a Master of Arts. He was entered at Queen's Col- 
lege,^ Oxford ; but he had not been many months there, 
when some of his Latin verses fell by accident into the 
hands of Dr. Lancaster, Dean of Magdalene College. 
The young scholar's diction and versification were al- 
ready such as veteran professors might envy. Dr. Lan- 
caster was desirous to serve a boy of such promise ; nor 
was an opportunity long wanting. The Eevolution 
had just taken place; and nowhere had it been hailed 
with more delight than at Magdalene College. That 
great and opulent corporation had been treated by 
James, and by his chancellor, with an insolence and 
injustice which, even in such a prince and in such a 
minister, may justly excite amazement, and which had 
done more than even the prosecution of the bishops to 
alienate the Church of England from the throne. A 
president, duly elected, had been violently expelled 
from his dwelling; a Papist had been set over the so- 
ciety by a royal mandate ; the fellows who, in conform- 
ity with their oaths, had refused to submit to this 
usurper, had been driven forth from their quiet clois- 



ADDISON. 83 

ters and gardens, to die of want or to live on charity. 
But the day of redress and retribution speedily came. 
The intruders were ejected; the venerable House was 
again inhabited by its old inmates ; learning flourished 
under the rule of the wise and virtuous Hough; 
and with learning was united a mild and liberal spirit 
too often wanting in the princely colleges of Oxford. 
In consequence of the troubles through which the so- 
ciety had passed, there had been no valid election of 
new members during the year 1688. In 1689, there- 
fore, there was twice the ordinary number of vacancies ; 
and thus Dr. Lancaster found it easy to procure for 
his young friend admittance to the advantages of a 
foundation then generally esteemed the wealthiest in 
Europe. 

At Magdalene Addison resided during ten years. 
He was, at first, one of those scholars who are called 
Demies, but was subsequently elected a fellow. His 
college is still proud of his name; his portrait still 
hangs in the hall ; and strangers are still told that his 
favorite walk was under the elms which fringe the 
meadow on the banks of the Cherwell. It is said, and 
is highly probable, that he was distinguished among his 
fellow-students by the delicacy of his feelings, by the 
shyness of his manners, and by the assiduity with which 
he often prolonged his studies fai into the night. It is 
certain that his reputation for ability and learning 
stood high. Many years later, the ancient doctors of 
Magdalene continued to talk in their common room of 
his boyish compositions, and expressed their sorrow 
that no copy of exercises so remarkable had been pre- 
served. 

It is proper, however, to remark that Miss Aikin 



84: MACAULAY'S 

has committed the error, very pardonable in a lady, of 
overrating Addison's classical attainments. In one de- 
partment of learning, indeed, his proficiency was such 
as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge 
of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down 
to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly exact and 
profound. He understood them thoroughly, entered 
into their spirit, and had the finest and most discrim- 
inating perception of all their peculiarities of style and 
melody; nay, he copied their manner with admirable 
skill, and surpassed, we think, all their British imita- 
tors who had preceded him, Buchanan and Milton 
alone excepted. This is high praise; and bej^ond this 
we cannot with justice go. It is clear that Addison's 
serious attention during his residence at the university 
was almost entirely concentrated on Latin poetry, and 
that, if he did not wholly neglect other provinces of an- 
cient literature, he vouchsafed to them only a cursory 
glance. He does not appear to have attained more 
than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and 
moral writers of Eome; nor was his own Latin prose 
by any means equal to his Latin verse. His knowledge 
of Greek, though doubtless such as was, in his time, 
thought respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than 
that which many lads now carry away every year from 
Eton and Rugby. A minute examination of his works, 
if we had time to make such an examination, would 
fully bear out these remarks. We will briefly advert to 
a few of the facts on which our judgment is grounded. 

Great praise is due to the Notes which Addison ap- 
pended to his version of the second and third books of 
the Metamorphoses. Yet those notes, while they show 
him to have been, in his own domain, an accomplished 



ADDISON. 85 

scholar, show also how confined that domain was. 
They are rich in apposite references to Virgil, Statins, 
and Claudian; but they contain not a single illustra- 
tion drawn from the Greek poets. Now if, in the 
whole compass of Latin literature, there be a passage 
which stands in need of illustration drawn from the 
Greek poets, it is the story of Pentheus in the third 
book of the Metamorphoses. Ovid was indebted for 
that story to Euripides and Theocritus, both of whom 
he has sometimes followed minutely. But neither to 
Euripides nor to Theocritus does Addison make the 
faintest allusion; and we therefore believe that we do 
not wrong him by supposing that he had little or no 
knowledge of their works. 

His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical 
quotations happily introduced; but scarcely one of 
those quotations is in prose. He draws more illustra- 
tions from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero. 
Even his notions of the political and military affairs 
of the Eomans seem to be derived from poets and poet- 
asters. Spots made memorable by events which have 
changed the destinies of the world, and which have 
been worthily recorded by great historians, bring to his 
mind only scraps of some ancient versifier. In the 
gorge of the Apennines he naturally remembers the 
hardships which Hannibal's army endured, and pro- 
ceeds to cite, not the authentic narrative of Polybius, 
not the picturesque narrative of Livy, but the languid 
hexameters of Silius Italicus. On the banks of the 
Rubicon he never thinks of Plutarch's lively descrip- 
tion, or of the stern conciseness of the Commentaries, 
or of those letters to Atticus which so forcibly express 
the alternations of hope and fear in a sensitive mind 



86 MACAULAY'S 

at a great crisis. His only authority for the events of 
the civil war is Lucan. 

, All the best ancient works of art at Kome and Flor- 
ence are Greek. Addison saw them, however, without 
recalling one single verse of Pindar, of Callimachus, or 
of the Attic dramatists ; but they brought to his recol- 
lection innumerable passages of Horace, Juvenal, Sta- 
tins, and Ovid. 

The same may be said of the Treatise on Medals. 
In that pleasing work we find about three hundred 
passages extracted with great judgment from the Eo- 
man poets, but we do not recollect a single passage 
taken from any Eoman orator or historian; and we 
are confident that not a line is quoted from any Greek 
writer. No person who had derived all his informa- 
tion on the subject of medals from Addison would sus- 
pect that the Greek coins were in historical interest 
equal, and in beauty of execution far superior, to those 
of Eome. 

If it were necessary to find any further proof that 
Addison's classical knowledge was confined within nar- 
row limits, that proof would be furnished by his Essay 
on the Evidences of Christianity, The Eoman poets 
throw little or no light on the literary and historical 
questions which he is under the necessity of examining 
in that essay. He is, therefore, left completely in the 
dark; and it is melancholy to see how helplessly he 
gropes his way from blunder to blunder. He assigns, 
as grounds for his religious belief, stories as absurd as 
that of the Cock-lane ghost,® and forgeries as rank as 
Ireland's Vortigern,^*^ puts faith in the lie about the 
Thundering Legion,^^ is convinced that Tiberius moved 
the senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pro- 



ADDISON. 87 

nounees the letter of Abgarus, King of Edessa, to be a 
record of great aiithority.^^ Nor were these errors the 
effects of superstition ; for to superstition Addison was 
by no means prone. The truth is that he was writing 
about what he did not understand. 

Miss Aikin has discovered a letter, from which it 
appears that, while Addison resided at Oxford, he was 
one of several writers whom the booksellers engaged to 
make an English version of Herodotus ; and she infers 
that he must have been a good Greek scholar. We can 
allow very little weight to this argument, when we con- 
sider that his fellow-laborers were to have been Boyle 
and Blackmore. Boyle is remembered chiefly as the 
nominal author of the worst book on Greek history and 
philology that ever was printed; and this book, bad 
as it is, Boyle was unable to produce without help. 
Of Blackmore's attainments in the ancient tongues, it 
may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has con- 
founded an aphorism with an apophthegm,^^ and that 
when, in his verse, he treats of classical subjects, his 
habit is to regale his readers with four false quantities 
to a page. 

It is probable that the classical acquirements of 
Addison were of as much service to him as if they had 
been more extensive. The world generally gives its 
admiration, not to the man who does what nobody else 
even attempts to dp, but to the man who does best what 
multitudes do well. Bentley was so immeasurably su- 
perior to all the other scholars of his time that few 
among them could discover his superiority. But the 
accomplishment in which Addison excelled his con- 
temporaries was then, as it is now, highly valued 
and assiduously cultivated at all English seats of 



88 MACAULAY'S 

learning. Everybody who had been at a public school 
had written Latin verses; many had written such 
verses with tolerable success, and were quite able to ap- 
preciate, though by no means able to rival, the skill 
with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the 
Barometer and the Bowling-green were applauded by 
hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles of 
Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on 
an obelisk. 
^-, Purity of style, and an easy flow of numbers, are 
common to all Addison's Latin poems. Our favorite 
piece is the Battle of the Cranes and Pygmies; for in 
that piece we discern a gleam of the fancy and humor 
which many years later enlivened thousands of break- 
fast-tables. Swift boasted that he was never known to 
steal a hint; and he certainly owed as little to his 
predecessors as any modern writer. Yet we cannot 
help suspecting that he borrowed, perhaps unconscious- 
ly, one of the happiest touches in his Voyage to Lilliput 
from Addison's verses. Let our readers judge. 

" The emperor," says Gulliver, " is taller by about 
the breadth of my nail than any of his court, which 
alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders." 

About thirty years before Gulliver's Travels ap- 
peared, Addison wrote these lines: 

" Jamque acies inter medias sese arduus infert 
Pygmeadum ductor, qui, majestate verendus, 
Incessuque gravis, reliquos supereminet omnes 
Mole gigantea, mediamque exsurgit in ulnam." '^* 

The Latin poems of Addison were greatly and just- 
ly admired both at Oxford and Cambridge, before his 
name had ever been heard by the wits who thronged 
the coffee-houses round Drurv Lane Theatre. In his 



ADDISON. 89 

twenty-second year, he ventured to appear before the 
public as a writer of English verse. He addressed 
some complimentary lines to Dryden, who, after many 
triumphs and many reverses, had at length reached a 
secure and lonely eminence among the literary men of 
that age. Dryden appears to have been much gratified 
by the young scholar's praise; and an interchange of 
civilities and good offices followed. Addison was prob- 
ably introduced by Dryden to Congreve, and was cer- 
tainly presented by Congreve to Charles Montague, 
who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and leader 
of the Whig party in the House of Commons. 

At this time Addison seemed inclined to devote 
himself to poetry. He published a translation of part 
of the fourth Georgic, Lines to King William, and 
other performances of equal value, that is to say, of no 
value at all. But in those days the public was in the 
habit of receiving with applause pieces which would 
now have little chance of obtaining the Newdigate prize 
or the Seatonian prize.^^ And the reason is obvious. 
The heroic couplet was then the favorite measure. 
The art of arranging words in that measure, so that the 
lines may flow smoothly, that the accents may fall 
correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear strongly, 
and that there may be a pause at the end of every 
distich, is an art as mechanical as that of mending a 
kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any 
human being who has sense enough to learn any- 
thing. But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradu- 
ally improved by means of many experiments and 
many failures. It was reserved for Pope to discover 
the trick, to make himself complete master of it, and 
to teach it to everybody else. From the time when his 



90 MACAULAY'S 

Pastorals appeared, heroic versification became matter 
of rule and compass ; and, before long, all artists were 
on a level. Hundreds of dunces who never blundered 
on one happy thought or expression were able to write 
reams of couplets which, as far as euphony was con- 
cerned, could not be distinguished from those of Pope' 
himself, and which very clever writers of the reign of 
Charles the Second, Rochester, for example, or Marvel, 
or Oldham, would have contemplated with admiring 
despair. 

Ben Jonson was a great man, Hoole a very small 
man. But Hoole, coming after Pope, had learned how 
to manufacture decasyllabic verses, and poured them 
forth by thousands and tens of thousands, all as well 
turned, as smooth, and as like each other as the blocks 
which have passed through Mr. Brunei's mill in the 
dockyard at Portsmouth. Ben's heroic couplets re- 
semble blocks rudely hewn out by an unpractised hand, 
with a blunt hatchet. Take as a specimen his trans- 
lation of a celebrated passage in the ^neid: 

" This child our parent earth, stirr'd up with spite 
Of all the gods, brought forth, and, as some write, 
She was last sister of that giant race 
That sought to scale Jove's court, right swift of pace, 
And swifter far of wing, a monster vast 
And dreadful. Look, how many plumes are placed 
On her huge corpse, so many waking eyes 
Stick underneath, and, which may stranger rise 
In the report, as many tongues she wears." 

Compare with these jagged, misshapen distichs the 
neat fabric which Hoole's machine produces in unlim- 
ited abundance. We take the first lines on which we 
open in his version of Tasso. They are neither better 
nor worse than the rest : 



ADDISON. 91 

" O thou, whoe'er thou art, whose steps are led. 
By choice or fate, these lonely shores to tread, 
No greater wonders east or west can boast 
Than yon small island on the pleasing coast. 
If e'er thy sight would blissful scenes explore, 
The current pass, and seek the further shore." 

Ever since the time of Pope there has been a glut 
of lines of this sort; and we are now as little disposed 
to admire a man for being able to write them as for 
being able to write his name. But in the days of 
William the Third such versification was rare; and a 
rhymer who had any skill in it passed for a great poet, 
just as in the dark ages a person who could write his 
name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly Duke, 
Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title 
to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what 
might have been as well said in prose, or what was not 
worth saying at all, were honored with marks of dis- 
tinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With 
these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned 
true and lasting glory by performances which very 
little resembled his juvenile poems. 

Dryden was now busied with Yirgil, and obtained 
from Addison a critical preface to the Georgics. In 
return for this service, and for other services of the 
same kind, the veteran poet, in the postscript to the 
translation of the ^neid, complimented his young 
friend with great liberality, and indeed with more lib- 
erality than sincerity. He affected to be afraid that 
his own performance would not sustain a comparison 
with the version of the fourth Georgic, by "the most 
ingenious Mr. Addison of Oxford." " After his bees," 
added Dryden, " my latter swarm is scarcely worth the 
hiving." 



92 MACAULAY'S 

The time had now arrived when it was necessary 
for Addison to choose a calling. Everything seemed 
to point his course toward the clerical profession. His 
habits were regular, his opinions orthodox. His col- 
lege had large ecclesiastical preferment in its gift, and 
boasts that it has given at least one bishop to almost 
every see in England. Dr. Lancelot Addison held an 
honorable place in the Church, and had set his heart on 
seeing his son a clergyman. It is clea^^ from some 
expressions in the young man's rhymes, that his inten- 
tion was to take orders. But Charles Montague inter- 
fered. Montague had first brought himself into no- 
tice by verses, well timed and not contemptibly written, 
but never, we think, rising above mediocrity. Fortu- 
nately for himself and for his country, he early quitted 
poetry, in which he could never have attained a rank 
as high as that of Dorset or Eochester, and turned his 
mind to official and parliamentary business. It is 
written that the ingenious person who undertook to in- 
struct Kasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, in the art of fly- 
ing, ascended an eminence, waved his wings, sprang 
into the air, and instantly dropped into the lake. But 
it is added that the wings, which were unable to sup- 
port him through the sk}^, bore him up effectually as 
soon as he was in the water. This is no bad type of 
the fate of Charles Montague, and of men like him. 
When he attempted to soar into the regions of poetical 
invention, he altogether failed; but as soon as he had 
descended from that ethereal elevation into a lower and 
grosser element, his talents instantly raised him above 
the mass. He became a distinguished financier, de- 
bater, courtier, and party leader. He still retained his 
fondness for the pursuits of his early days; but he 



ADDISON. 93 

showed that fondness not by wearying the public with 
his own feeble performances, but by discovering and 
encouraging literary excellence in others. A crowd of 
wits and poets, who could easily have vanquished him 
as a competitor, revered him as a judge and a patron. 
In his ^lans for the encouragement of learning, he was 
cordially supported by the ablest and most virtuous of 
his colleagues, the Lord Chancellor Somers. Though 
both these great statesmen had a sincere love of letters, 
it was not solely from a love of letters that they were 
desirous to enlist youths of high intellectual qualifica- 
tions in the public service. The Eevolution had altered 
the whole system of government. Before that event, the 
press had been controlled by censors, and the Parlia- 
ment had sat only two months in eight years. Now the 
press was free, and had begun to exercise unprecedent- 
ed influence on the public mind. Parliament met an- 
nually, and sat long. The chief power in the state 
had passed to the House of Commons. At such a con- 
juncture, it was natural that literary and oratorical 
talents should rise in value. There was danger that a 
government which neglected such talents might be sub- 
verted by them. It was, therefore, a profound and en- 
lightened policy which led Montague and Somers to 
attach such talents to the Whig party, by the strongest 
ties both of interest and of gratitude. 

It is remarkable that in a neighboring country we 
have recently seen similar effects follow from similar 
causes. The Revolution of July, 1830, established 
representative government in France. The men of 
letters instantly rose to the highest importance in the 
state. At the present moment most of the persons 
whom we see at the head both of the administration 



9^ MACAULAY'S 

and of the opposition have been professors, historians, 
journalists, poets. The influence of the literary class 
in England, during the generation which followed the 
Eevolution, was great, but by no means so great as it 
has lately been in France; for, in England, the aris- 
tocracy of intellect had to contend with a powerful and 
deeply rooted aristocracy of a very different kind. 
France had no Somersets and Shrewsburys to keep 
down her Addisons and Priors. 
^ fT' It was in the year 1G99, when Addison had just 
completed his twenty-seventh year, that the course of 
his life was finally determined. Both the great chiefs 
of the ministry were kindly disposed towards him. In 
political opinions he already was what he continued 
to be through life, a firm, though a moderate, AVhig. 
He had addressed the most polished and vigorous of 
his early English lines to Somers, and had dedicated to 
Montague a Latin poem, truly Virgilian, both in style 
and rhythm, on the Peace of Eyswick. The wish of 
the young poet^s great friends was, it should seem, to 
employ him in the service of the crown abroad. But 
an intimate knowledge of the French language was a 
qualification indispensable to a diplomatist; and this 
qualification Addison had not acquired. It was, there- 
fore, thought desirable that he should pass some time 
on the Continent in preparing himself for official em- 
ployment. His own means were not such as would en- 
able him to travel, but a pension of three hundred 
pounds a year was procured for him by the interest of 
the lord chancellor. It seems to have been apprehend- 
ed that some difficulty might be started by the rulers 
of Magdalene College. But the Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer wrote in the strongest terms to Hough. The 



ADDISON. 95 

state — such was the purport of Montague's letter — 
could not, at that time, spare to the Church such a 
man as Addison. Too many high civil posts were 
already occupied by adventurers, who, destitute of 
every liberal art and sentiment, at once pillaged and 
disgraced the country which they pretended to serve. 
It had become necessary to recruit for the public serv- 
ice from a very different class, from that class of 
which Addison was the representative. The close of 
the minister's letter was remarkable. " I am called," 
he said, " an enemy of the Church. But I will never 
do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out 
of it." 

This interference was successful ; and, in the sum- 
mer of 1699, Addison, made a rich man by his pension, 
and still retaining his fellowship, quitted his beloved 
Oxford, and set out on his travels. He crossed from 
Dover to Calais, proceeded to Paris, and was received 
there with great kindness and politeness by a kinsman 
of his friend Montague, Charles, Earl of Manchester, 
who had just been appointed ambassador to the court 
of France. The countess, a Whig and a toast, was 
probably as gracious as her lord ; for Addison long re- 
tained an agreeable recollection of the impression 
which she at this time made on him, and, in some lively 
lines written on the glasses of the Kit Cat Club,^^ de- 
scribed the envy which her cheeks, glowing with the 
genuine bloom of England, had excited among the 
painted beauties of Versailles. 

Lewis the Fourteenth was at this time expiating 
the vices of his youth by a devotion which had no root 
in reason, and bore no fruit of charity. The servile 
literature of France had changed its character to suit 



96 MACAULAY'S 

the changed character of the prince. No book ap- 
peared that had not an air of sanctity. Eacine, who 
was just dead, had passed the close of his life in writ- 
ing sacred dramas; and Dacier was seeking for the 
Athanasian mysteries in Plato. Addison described 
this state of things in a short but lively and graceful 
letter to Montague. Another letter, written about the 
same time to the lord chancellor, conveyed the strong- 
est assurances of gratitude and attachment. " The 
only return I can make to your lordship/' said Addison, 
" will be to apply myself entirely to my business." 
With this view he quitted Paris and repaired to Blois, 
a place where it was supposed that the French lan- 
guage was spoken in its highest purity, and where not 
a single Englishman could be found. Here he passed 
some months pleasantly and profitably. Of his way of 
life at Blois, one of his associates, an abbe named 
Philippeaux, gave an account to Joseph Spence. If 
this account is to be trusted, Addison studied much, 
mused much, talked little, had fits of absence, and 
either had no love-affairs, or was too discreet to confide 
them to the abbe. A man who, even when surrounded 
by fellow-countrymen and fellow-students, had always 
been remarkably shy and silent, was not likely to be lo- 
quacious in a foreign tongue, and among foreign com- 
panions. But it is clear from Addison's letters, some 
of which were long after published in the Guardian, 
that, while he appeared to be absorbed in his own medi- 
tations, he was really observing French society with 
that keen and sly yet not ill-natured side glance which 
was peculiarly his own. 

From Blois he returned to Paris ; and, having now 
mastered the French language, found great pleasure in 



ADDISON. 97 

the society of French philosophers and poets. He gave 
an account, in a letter to Bishop Hough, of two highly 
interesting conversations, one with Malbranche, the 
other with Boileau. Malbranche expressed great par- 
tiality for the English, and extolled the genius of New- 
ton, but shook his head when Hobbes was mentioned, 
and was indeed so unjust as to call the author of the 
Leviathan a poor silly creature. Addison's modesty 
restrained him from fully relating, in his letter, the 
circumstances of his introduction to Boileau. Boileau, 
having survived the friends and rivals of his youth, 
old, deaf, and melancholy, lived in retirement, seldom 
went either to court or to the Academy,^'^ and was al- 
most inaccessible to strangers. Of the English and of 
English literature he knew nothing. He had hardly 
heard the name of Dryden. Some of our countrymen, 
in the warmth of their patriotism, have asserted that 
this ignorance must have been affected. We own that 
we see no ground for such a supposition. English lit- 
erature was to the French of the age of Lewis the Four- 
teenth what German literature was to our own grand- 
fathers. Very few, we suspect, of the accomplished 
men who, sixty or seventy years ago, used to dine in 
Leicester Square with Sir Joshua, or at Streatham 
with Mrs. Thrale, had the slightest notion that Wie- 
land was one of the first wits and poets, and Lessing, 
beyond all dispute, the first critic in Europe. Boileau 
knew just as little about the Paradise Lost, and about 
Absalom and Ahitophel; but he had read Addison's 
Latin poems, and admired them greatly. They had 
given him, he said, quite a new notion of the state of 
learning and taste among the English. Johnson will 
have it that these praises were insincere. " Nothing," 



98 MACAULAY'S 

says he, " is better known of Boileau than that he had 
an injudicious and peevish contempt of modern Latin; 
and therefore his profession of regard was probably 
the effect of his civility rather than approbation." 
Now, nothing is better known of Boileau than that he 
was singularly sparing of compliments. We do not 
remember that either friendship or fear ever induced 
him to bestow praise on any composition which he did 
not approve. On literary questions, his caustic, dis- 
dainful, and self-confident spirit rebelled against that 
authority to which everything else in France bowed 
down. He had the spirit to tell Lewis the Fourteenth, 
firmly and even rudely, that his majesty knew nothing 
about poetry, and admired verses which were detest- 
able. What was there in Addison's position that could 
induce the satirist, whose stern and fastidious temper 
had been the dread of two generations, to turn syco- 
phant for the first and last time? Nor was Boileau's 
contempt of modern Latin either injudicious or pee- 
vish. He thought, indeed, that no poem of the first or- 
der would ever be written in a dead language. And did 
he think amiss? Has not the experience of centuries 
confirmed his opinion? Boileau also thought it prob- 
able that, in the best modern Latin, a writer of the Au- 
gustan Age would have detected ludicrous improprie- 
ties. And who can think otherwise? What modern 
scholar can honestly declare that he sees the smallest 
impurity in the style of Livy? Yet is it not certain 
that, in the style of Livy, Pollio, whose taste had been 
formed on the banks of the Tiber, detected the inele- 
gant idiom of the Po? Has any modern scholar un- 
derstood Latin better than Frederic the Great under- 
stood French? Yet is it not notorious that Frederic 



ADDISON. 99 

the Great, after reading, speaking, writing French, and 
nothing but French, during more than half a century, 
after unlearning his mother-tongue in order to learn 
French, after living familiarly during many years with 
French associates, could not, to the last, compose in 
French, without imminent risk of committing some 
mistake which would have moved a smile in the liter- 
ary circles of Paris ? Do we believe that Erasmus and 
Fracastorius wrote Latin as well as Dr. Robertson and 
Sir Walter Scott wrote English? And are there not 
in the Dissertation on India, the last of Dr. Eobertson's 
works, in Waverley, in Marmion, Scotticisms at which 
a 'London apprentice would laugh? But does it fol- 
low, because we think thus, that we can find nothing 
to admire in the noble alcaics of Gray, or in the play- 
ful elegiacs of Vincent Bourne? Surely not. Nor 
was Boileau so ignorant or tasteless as to be incapable 
of appreciating good modern Latin. In the very let- 
ter to which Johnson alludes, Boileau says, " Ne croyez 
pas pourtant que je veuille par la blamer les vers Latins 
que vous m'avez envoyes d'un de vos illustres acade- 
miciens. Je les ai trouves fort beaux, et dignes de Vida 
et de Sannazar, mais non pas d'Horace et de Vir- 
gile.'' ^^ Several poems, in modern Latin, have been 
praised by Boileau quite as liberally as it was his habit 
to praise anything. He says, for example, of the Pere 
Fraguier's epigrams, that Catullus seems to have come 
to life again. But the best proof that Boileau did not 
feel the undiscerning contempt for modern Latin verses 
which has been imputed to him is, that he wrote and 
published Latin verses in several metres. Indeed, it 
happens, curiously enough, that the most severe cen- 
sure ever pronounced by him on modern Latin is con- 



100 MACAULAY'S 

veyed in Latin hexameters. We allude to the frag- 
ment which begins — 

" Quid numeris iterum me balbutire Latinis, 
Longe Alpes citia natum de patie Sicambro, 
Musa, jubes?"^^ 

For these reasons we feel assured that the praise 
which Boileau bestowed on the Machinge Gesticulantes 
and the Gerano-Pygmaeomachia^*^ was sincere. He cer- 
tainly opened himself to Addison with a freedom which 
was a sure indication of esteem. Literature was the 
chief subject of conversation. The old man talked on 
his favorite theme much and well — indeed, as his 
young hearer thought, incomparably well. Boileau 
had undoubtedly some of the qualities of a great critic. 
He wanted imagination; but he had strong sense. 
His literary code was formed on narrow principles; 
but in applying it, he showed great judgment and pene- 
tration. In mere style, abstracted from the ideas of 
which style is the garb, his taste was excellent. He 
was well acquainted with the great Greek writers; 
and, though unable fully to appreciate their creative 
genius, admired the majestic simplicity of their man- 
ner, and had learned from them to despise bombast 
and tinsel. It is easy, we think, to discover, in the 
Spectator and the Guardian, traces of the influence, in 
part salutary and in part pernicious, which the mind of 
Boileau had on the mind of Addison. 

While Addison was at Paris, an event took place 
which made that capital a disagreeable residence for 
an Englishman and a Whig. Charles, second of the 
name. King of Spain, died ; and bequeathed his domin- 
ions to Philip, Duke of Anjou, a younger son of the 
Dauphin. The King of France, in direct violation of 



ADDISON. 101 

his engagements both with Great Britain and with the 
States General, accepted the bequest on behalf of his 
grandson. The house of Bourbon was at the summit 
of human grandeur. England had been outwitted, 
and found herself in a situation at once degrading and 
p^-ilous. The people of France, not presaging the 
calamities by which they were destined to expiate the 
perfidy of their sovereign, went mad with pride and 
delight. Every man looked as if a great estate had 
just been left him. " The French conversation," said 
Addison, "begins to grow insupportable; that which 
was before the vainest nation in the world is now worse 
than ever." Sick of the arrogant exultation of the 
Parisians, and probably foreseeing that the peace be- 
tween France and England could not be of long dura- 
tion, he set off for Italy. 

In December, 1700, he embarked at Marseilles. As 
he glided along the Ligurian coast, he was delighted 
by the sight of myrtles and olive trees, which retained 
their verdure under the winter solstice. Soon, how- 
ever, he encountered one of the black storms of the 
Mediterranean. The captain of the ship gave up all 
for lost, and confessed himself to a Capuchin who hap- 
pened to be on board. The English heretic, in the 
mean time, fortified himself against the terrors of 
death with devotions of a very different kind. How 
strong an impression this perilous voyage made on him 
appears from the ode, " How are thy servants blest, 
Lord!" which was long after published in the Spec- 
tator. After some days of discomfort and danger, Ad- 
dison was glad to land at Savona, and to make his way, 
over mountains where no road had yet been hewn out 
by art, to the city of Genoa. 



102 MACAULAY'S 

At Genoa, still ruled by her own Doge, and by the 
nobles whose names were inscribed on her Book of 
Gold, Addison made a short stay. He admired the 
narrow streets overhung by long lines of towering pal- 
aces, the walls rich with frescoes, the gorgeous temple 
of the Annunciation, and the tapestries whereon were 
recorded the long glories of the house of Doria. 
Thence he hastened to Milan, where he contemplated 
the Gothic magnificence of the cathedral with more 
wonder than pleasure. He passed Lake Benacus while 
a gale was blowing, and saw the waves raging as they 
raged when Virgil looked upon them. At Venice, then 
the gayest spot in Europe, the traveller spent the Car- 
nival, the gayest season of the year, in the midst of 
masques, dances, and serenades. Here he was at once 
diverted and provoked by the absurd dramatic pieces 
which then disgraced the Italian stage. To one of 
those pieces, however, he was indebted for a valuable 
hint. He was present when a ridiculous play on the 
death of Cato was performed. Cato, it seems, was 
in love with a daughter of Scipio. The lady had 
given her heart to Caesar. The rejected lover deter- 
mined to destroy himself. He appeared seated in his 
library, a dagger in his hand, a Plutarch and a Tasso 
before him ; and, in this position, he pronounced a so- 
liloquy before he struck the blow. We are surprised 
that so remarkable a circumstance as this should have 
escaped the notice of all Addison's biographers. There 
cannot, we conceive, be the smallest doubt that this 
scene, in spite of its absurdities and anachronisms, 
struck the traveller's imagination, and suggested to 
him the thought of bringing Cato on the English stage. 
It is well known that about this time he beofan his 



ADDISON. 103 

tragedy, and that he finished the first four acts before 
he returned to England. 

On his way from Venice to Rome, he was drawn 
some miles out of a beaten road, by a wish to see the 
smallest independent state in Europe. On a rock 
where the snow still lay, though the Italian spring 
was now far advanced, was perched the little fortress of 
San Marino. ^^ The roads which led to the secluded 
town were so bad that few travellers had ever visited it, 
and none had ever published an account of it. Ad- 
dison could not suppress a good-natured smile at the 
simple manners and institutions of this singular com- 
munity. But he observed, with the exultation of a 
Whig, that the rude mountain tract which formed the 
territory of the republic swarmed with an honest, 
healthy, and contented peasantry, while the rich plain 
which surrounded the metropolis of civil and spiritual 
tyranny was scarcely less desolate than the uncleared 
wilds of America. 

At Eome Addison remained on his first visit only 
long enough to catch a glimpse of St. Peter's and of the 
Pantheon. His haste is the more extraordinary be- 
cause the Holy Week was close at hand. He has given 
no hint which can enable us to pronounce why he chose 
to fly from a spectacle which every year allures from 
distant regions persons of far less taste and sensibility 
than his. Possibly, travelling, as he did, at the charge 
of a government distinguished by its enmity to the 
Church of Rome, he may have thought that it would be 
imprudent in him to assist at the most magnificent rite 
of that Church. Many eyes would be upon him; and 
he might find it difficult to behave in such a manner as 
to give offence neither to his patrons in England, nor 



104 MACAULAY'S 

to those among whom he resided. Whatever his mo- 
tives may have been, he turned his back on the most 
august and affecting ceremony which is known among 
men, and posted along the Appian Way to Naples. 

Naples was then destitute of what are now, per- 
haps, its chief attractions. The lovely bay and the 
awful mountain were indeed there. But a farm- 
house stood on the theatre of Herculaneum,^^ and rows 
of vines grew over the streets of Pompeii. The tem- 
ples of Pa^lstum had not, indeed, been hidden from the 
eye of man by any great convulsion of nature; but, 
strange to say, their existence was a secret even to art- 
ists and antiquaries. Though situated within a few 
hours' journey of a great capital, where Salvator had 
not long before painted, and where Vico was then lec- 
turing, those noble remains were as little known to 
Europe as the ruined cities overgrown by the forests of 
Yucatan. What was to be seen at Naples, Addison 
saw. He climbed Vesuvius, explored the tunnel of Po- 
silipo, and wandered among the vines and almond trees 
of Caprese. But neither the wonders of nature nor 
those of art could so occupy his attention as to prevent 
him from noticing, though cursorily, the abuses of 
the Government and the misery of the people. The 
great kingdom which had just descended to Philip the 
Fifth was in a state of paralytic dotage. Even Castile 
and Aragon were sunk in wretchedness. Yet, com- 
pared with the Italian dependencies of the Spanish 
crown, Castile and Aragon might be called prosper- 
ous. It is clear that all the observations which Ad- 
dison made in Italy tended to confirm him in the po- 
litical opinions which he had adopted at home. To 
the last, he always spoke of foreign travel as the best 



ADDISON. 105 

cure for Jacobitism. In his Freeholder, the Tory fox- 
hunter asks what travelling is good for, except to teach 
a man to jabber French, and to talk against passive 
obedience. 

From Naples Addison returned to Eome by sea 
along the coast which his favorite Virgil had cele- 
brated. The felucca passed the headland where the 
oar and trumpet were placed by the Trojan adventur- 
ers on the tomb of Misenus, and anchored at night 
under the shelter of the fabled promontory of Circe. 
The voyage ended in the Tiber, still overhung with 
dark verdure, and still turbid with yellow sand, as 
when it met the eyes of ^neas. From the ruined port 
of Ostia the stranger hurried to Eome; and at Rome 
he remained during those hot and sickly months when, 
even in the Augustan Age, all who could make their 
escape fled from mad dogs and from streets black with 
funerals, to gather the first figs of the season in the 
country. It is probable that, when he, long after, 
poured forth in verse his gratitude to the Providence 
which had enabled him to breathe unhurt in tainted 
air, he was thinking of the August and September 
which he passed at Eome. 

It was not till the latter end of October that he 
tore himself away from the masterpieces of ancient 
and modern art which are collected in the city so long 
the mistress of the world. He then journeyed north- 
ward, passed through Siena, and for a moment forgot 
his prejudices in favor of classic architecture as he 
looked on the magnificent cathedral. At Florence he 
spent some days with the Duke of Shrewsbury, who, 
cloyed with the pleasures of ambition, and impatient 
of its pains, fearing both parties, and loving neither, 



106 MACAULAY'S 

had determined to hide in an Italian retreat talents 
and accomplishments which, if they had been united 
with fixed principles and civil courage, might have 
made him the foremost man of his age. These days, 
we are told, passed pleasantly; and we can easily be- 
lieve it. For Addison was a delightful companion 
when he was at his ease; and the Duke, though he 
seldom forgot that he was a Talbot, had the invaluable 
art of putting at ease all who came near him. 

Addison gave some time to Florence, and especially 
to the sculptures in the Museum, which he preferred 
even to those of the Vatican. He then pursued his 
journey through a country in which the ravages of 
the last war were still discernible, and in which all 
men were looking forward with dread to a still fiercer 
conflict. Eugene had already descended from the 
Ehaetian Alps to dispute with Catinat the rich plain 
of Lombardy. The faithless ruler of Savoy was still 
reckoned among the allies of Lewis. England had not 
yet actually declared war against France; but Man- 
chester had left Paris ; and the negotiations which pro- 
duced the Grand Alliance against the house of Bour- 
bon were in progress. Under such circumstances, it 
was desirable for an English traveller to reach neutral 
ground without delay. Addison resolved to cross 
Mont Cenis. It was December; and the road was very 
different from that which now reminds the stranger of 
the power and genius of Napoleon. The winter, how- 
ever, was mild; and the passage was, for those times, 
easy. To this journey Addison alluded when, in the 
ode which we have already quoted, he said that for 
him the Divine goodness had warmed the hoary Alpine 
hills. 



ADDISON. 107 

It was in the midst of the eternal snow that he 
composed his Epistle to his friend Montague, now 
Lord Halifax. That Epistle, once widely renowned, is 
now known only to curious readers, and will hardly be 
considered by those to whom it is known as in any per- 
ceptible degree heightening Addison's fame. It is, 
however, decidedly superior to any English composi- 
tion which he had previously published. Nay, we 
think it quite as good as any poem in heroic metre 
which appeared during the -interval between the death 
of Dryden and the publication of the Essay on Criti- 
cism. It contains passages as good as the second-rate 
passages of Pope, and would have added to the reputa- 
tion of Parnell or Prior. 

But, whatever be the literary merits or defects of 
the Epistle, it undoubtedly does honor to the principles 
and spirit of the author. Halifax had now nothing to 
give. He had fallen from power, had been held up to 
obloquy, had been impeached by the House of Com- 
mons, and, though his peers had dismissed the impeach- 
ment, had, as it seemed, little chance of ever again fill- 
ing high office. The Epistle, written at such a time, 
is one among many proofs that there was no mixture of 
cowardice or meanness in the suavity and moderation 
which distinguished Addison from all the other public 
men of those stormy times. 

At Geneva the traveller learned that a partial 
change of ministry had taken place in England, and 
that the Earl of Manchester had become Secretary of 
State. Manchester exerted himself to serve his young 
friend. It was thought advisable that an English 
agent should be near the person of Eugene in Italy; 
and Addison, whose diplomatic education was now 



108 MACAULAY'S 

finished, was the man selected. He was preparing to 
enter on his honorable functions, when all his prospects 
were for a time darkened by the death of William the 
Third. 

Anne had long felt a strong aversion, personal, po- 
litical, and religious, to the Whig party. That aver- 
sion appeared in the first measures of her reign. Man- 
chester was deprived of the seals, after he had held 
them only a few weeks. Neither Somers nor Halifax 
was sworn of the Privy Council. Addison shared the 
fate of his three patrons. His hopes of employment 
in the public service were at an end; his pension was 
stopped ; and it was necessary for him to support him.- 
self by his own exertions. He became tutor to a young 
English traveller, and appears to have rambled with 
his pupil over great part of Switzerland and Germany. 
At this time he wrote his pleasing treatise on Medals. 
It was not published till after his death; but several 
distinguished scholars saw the manuscript, and gave 
just praise to the grace of the st3'le, and to the learning 
and ingenuity evinced by the quotations. 

From Germany Addison repaired to Holland, 
where he learned the melancholy news of his father's 
death. After passing some months in the United 
Provinces, he returned about the close of the year 1703 
to England. He was there cordially received by his 
friends, and introduced by them into the Kit Cat Club, 
a society in which were collected all the various talents 
and accomplishments which then gave lustre to the 
Whig party. 

Addison was, during some months after his return 
from the Continent, hard pressed by pecuniary diffi- 
culties. But it was soon in the power of his noble 



ADDISON. 109 

patrons to serve him effectually. A political change, 
silent and gradual, but of the highest importance, was 
in daily progress. The accession of Anne had been 
hailed by the Tories with transports of joy and hope; 
and for a time it seemed that the Whigs had fallen 
never to rise again. The throne was surrounded by 
men supposed to be attached to the prerogative and to 
the Church; and among these none stood so high in 
the favor of the sovereign as the Lord-treasurer Godol- 
phin and the Captain-general Marlborough. 

The country gentlemen and country clergymen had 
fully expected that the policy of these ministers would 
be directly opposed to that which had been almost con- 
stantly followed by William; that the landed interest 
would be favored at the expense of trade; that no ad- 
dition would be made to the funded debt; that the 
privileges conceded to Dissenters by the late king 
would be curtailed, if not withdrawn; that the war 
with France, if there must be such a war, would, on 
our part, be almost entirely naval; and that the Gov- 
ernment would avoid close connections with foreign 
powers, and, above all, with Holland. 

But the country gentlemen and country clergymen 
were fated to be deceived, not for the last time. The 
prejudices and passions which raged without control 
in vicarages, in cathedral closes, and in the manor- 
houses of fox-hunting squires, were not shared by the 
chiefs of the ministry. Those statesmen saw that it 
was both for the public interest and for their own in- 
terest to adopt a Whig policy, at least as respected the 
alliances of the country and the conduct of the war. 
But if the foreign policy of the Whigs were adopted, 
it was impossible to abstain from adopting also their 



110 MACAULAY'S 

financial policy. The natural consequences followed. 
The rigid Tories were alienated from the Government. 
The votes of the Whigs became necessary to it. The 
votes of the Whigs could be secured only by further 
concessions^ and further concessions the queen was in- 
duced to make. 

At the beginning of the year 1704, the state of 
parties bore a close analogy to the state of parties in 
1826. In 1826, as in 1704, there was a Tory ministry 
divided into two hostile sections. The position of Mr. 
Canning and his friends in 1826 corresponded to that 
which Marlborough and Godolphin occupied in 1704. 
Nottingham and Jersey were, in 1704, what Lord 
Eldon and Lord Westmoreland were in 1826. The 
Whigs of 1704 were in a situation resembling 
that in which the Whigs of 1826 stood. In 1704, 
Somers, Halifax, Sunderland, Cowper, were not in of- 
fice. There was no avowed coalition betAveen them and 
the moderate Tories. It is probable that no direct 
comnmnication tending to such a coalition had yet 
taken place ; yet all men saw that such a coalition was 
inevitable, nay, that it was already half formed. Such, 
or nearly such, was the state of things when tidings ar- 
rived of the great battle fought at .Blenheim on the 
13th August, 1704. By the Whigs the news Vv^as hailed 
with transports of joy and pride. No fault, no cause 
of quarrel, could be remembered by them against the 
commander whose genius had, in one day, changed the 
face of Europe, saved the imperial throne, humbled the 
house of Bourbon, and secured the Act of Settlement 
against foreign hostility. The feeling of the Tories 
was very different. They could not indeed, without 
imprudence, openly express regret at an event so glori- 



ADDISON. Ill 

ous to their country; but their congratulations were 
so cold and sullen as to give deep disgust to the victori- 
ous general and his friends. 
l^ '•■' Godolphin was npt a reading man. Whatever time 
he could spare from business he was in the habit of 
spending at Newmarket ^^ or at the card-table. But he 
was not absolutely indifferent to poetry; and he was 
too intelligent an observer not to perceive that litera- 
ture was a formidable engine of political warfare, and 
that the great Whig leaders had strengthened their 
party, and raised their character, by extending a lib- 
eral and judicious patronage to good writers. He was 
mortified, and not without reason, by the exceeding 
badness of the poems which appeared in honor of the 
battle of Blenheim. One of these poems has been res- 
cued from oblivion by the exquisite absurdity of three 
lines. 

" Think of two thousand gentlemen at least, 

And each man mounted on his capering beast; 

Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals." 

Where to procure better verses the treasurer did not 
know. He understood how to negotiate a loan, or re- 
mit a subsidy : he was also well versed in the history of 
running horses and fighting cocks; but his acquaint- 
ance among the poets was very small. He consulted 
Halifax; but Halifax affected to decline the office of 
adviser. He had, he said, done his best, when he had 
power, to encourage men whose abilities and acquire- 
ments might do honor to their country. Those times 
were over. Other maxims had prevailed. Merit was 
suffered to pine in obscurity, and the public money was 
squandered on the undeserving. " I do know," he 
added, " a gentleman who would celebrate the battle in 



112 MACAULAY'S 

a manner worthy of the subject; but I will not name 
him." Godolphin, who was expert at the soft answer 
which turneth away wrath, and who was under the 
necessity of paying court to the Whigs, gently replied 
that there was too much ground for Halifax's com- 
plaints, but that what was amiss should in time be rec- 
tified, and that in the mean time the services of a man 
such as Halifax had described should be liberally re- 
warded. Halifax then mentioned Addison, but, mind- 
ful of the dignity as well as of the pecuniary interest of 
his friend, insisted that the minister should apply in 
the most courteous manner to Addison himself; and 
this Godolphin promised to do. 

Addison then occupied a garret up three pair of 
stairs, over a small shop in the Haymarket. In this 
humble lodging he was surprised, on the morning 
which followed the conversation between Godolphin 
and Halifax, by a visit from no less a person than the 
Eight Honorable Henry Boyle, then Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, and afterward Lord Carleton. This high- 
born minister had been sent by the Lord Treasurer as 
ambassador to the needy poet. Addison readily un- 
dertook the proposed task, a task which, to so good a 
Whig, was probably a pleasure. When the poem was 
little more than half finished, he showed it to Godol- 
phin, who was delighted with it, and particularly with 
the famous similitude of the Angel. Addison was in- 
stantly appointed to a commissionership worth about 
two hundred pounds a year, and was assured that this 
appointment was only an earnest of greater favors. 

The Campaign came forth, and was as much ad- 
mired by the public as by the minister. It pleases us 
less, on the whole, than the Epistle to Halifax. Yet 



ADDISON. 113 

it undoubtedly ranks high among the poems which ap- 
peared during the interval between the death of Dry- 
den and the dawn of Pope's genius. The chief merit 
of the Campaign, we think, is that which was noticed 
by Johnson, the manly and rational rejection of fiction. 
The first great poet whose works have come down to us 
sang of war long before war became a science or a 
trade. If, in his time, there was enmity between two 
little Greek towns, each poured forth its crowd of citi- 
zens, ignorant of discipline, and armed with imple- 
ments of labor rudely turned into weapons. On each 
side appeared conspicuous a few chiefs whose wealth 
had enabled them to procure good armor, horses, and 
chariots, and whose leisure had enabled them to prac- 
tise military exercises. One such chief, if he were a 
man of great strength, agility, and courage, would 
probably be more formidable than twenty common 
men; and the force and dexterity with which he 
flung his spear might have no inconsiderable share 
in deciding the event of the day. Such were probably 
the battles with which Homer was familiar. But 
Homer related the actions of men of a former genera- 
tion, of men who sprang from the gods, and communed 
with the gods face to face, of men one of whom could 
with ease hurl rocks which two sturdy hinds of a later 
period would be unable even to lift. He therefore 
naturally represented their martial exploits as resem- 
bling in kind, but far surpassing in magnitude, those of 
the stoutest and most expert combatants of his own age. 
Achilles, clad in celestial armor, drawn by celestial 
coursers, grasping the spear which none but himself 
could raise, driving all Troy and Lycia before him, 
and choking Scamander with dead, was only a magnifi- 



114 MACAULAY'S 

cent exaggeration of the real hero, who, strong, fear- 
less, accustomed to the use of weapons, guarded by a 
shield and helmet of the best Sidonian fabric, and 
whirled along by horses of Thessalian breed, struck 
down with his own right arm foe after foe. In all 
rude societies similar notions are found. There are 
at this day countries where the Lifeguardsman Shaw ^* 
would be considered as a much greater warrior than 
the Duke of Wellington. Bonaparte loved to describe 
the astonishment with which the Mamelukes looked at 
his diminutive figure. Mourad Bey, distinguished 
above all his fellows by his bodily strength, and by the 
skill with which he managed his horse and his sabre, 
could not believe that a man who was scarcely five feet 
liigh, and rode like a butcher, could be the greatest sol- 
dier in Europe. 
¥1' Homer's descriptions of war had therefore as much 
truth as poetry requires. But truth was altogether 
wanting to the performances of those who, writing 
about battles which had scarcely anything in common 
with the battles of his times, servilely imitated his 
manner. The folly of Silius Italicus, in particular, is 
positively nauseous. He undertook to record in verse 
the vicissitudes of a great struggle between generals of 
the first order; and his narrative is made up of the 
hideous wounds which these generals inflicted with 
their own hands. Asdrubal flings a spear which grazes 
the shoulder of the consul Nero; but Nero sends his 
spear into Asdrubal's side. Fabius slays Thuris and 
Butes and Maris and Arses, and the long-haired Ad- 
herbes, and the gigantic Thvlis, and Sapharus and 
Monaesus, and the trumpeter Morinus. Hannibal runs 
Perusinus through the groin with a stake, and breaks 



ADDISON. 115 

the backbone of Telesinus with a huge stone. This 
detestable fashion was copied in modern times, and 
continued to prevail down to the age of Addison. 
Several versifiers had described William turning thou- 
sands to flight by his single prowess, and dyeing the 
Boyne with Irish blood. Nay, so estimable a writer as 
John Philips, the author of the Splendid Shilling, 
represented Marlborough as having won the battle of 
Blenheim merely by strength of muscle and skill in 
fence. The following lines may serve as an ex- 
ample : 

" Churchill, viewing where 
The violence of Tallard most prevail'd, 
Came to oppose his slaughtering arm. With speed 
Precipitate he rode, urging his way 
O'er hills of gasping heroes, and fallen steeds 
Eolling in death. Destruction, grim with blood, 
Attends his furious course. Around his head 
The glowing balls play innocent, while he 
With dire impetuous sway deals fatal blows 
Among the flying Gauls. In Gallic blood 
He dyes his reeking sword, and strews the ground 
With headless ranks. What can they do? Or how 
,^ Withstand his wide-destroying sword ? " 

y Addison, with excellent sense and taste, departed 
from this ridiculous fashion. He reserved his praise 
for the qualities which made Marlborough truly great, 
energy, sagacit)^, military science. But, above all, the 
poet extolled the firmness of that mind which, in the 
midst of confusion, uproar, and slaughter, examined 
and disposed everything with the serene wisdom of a 
higher intelligence. 

''■■ Here it was that he introduced the famous com- 
parison of ^larlborougli to an angel guiding the whirl- 
wind.^^ We will not dispute the general justice of 



116 MACAULAY'S 

Johnson's remarks ^® on this passage. But we must 
point out one circumstance which appears to have es- 
caped all the critics. The extraordinary effect which 
this simile produced when it first appeared, and which 
to the following generation seemed inexplicable, is 
doubtless to be chiefly attributed to a line which most 
readers now regard as a feeble parenthesis, 

" Such as, of late, o'er pale Britannia pass'd." 

Addison spoke, not of a storm, but of the storm. 
The great tempest of November, 1703, the only tempest 
which in our latitude has equalled the rage of a tropical 
hurricane, had left a dreadful recollection in the minds 
of all men. No other tempest was ever in this coun- 
try the occasion of a parliamentary address or of a 
public fast. Whole fleets had been cast away. Large 
mansions had been blown down. One prelate had been 
buried beneath the ruins of his palace. London and 
Bristol had presented the appearance of cities just 
sacked. Hundreds of families were still in mourning. 
The prostrate trunks of large trees, and the ruins of 
houses, still attested, in all the Southern counties, the 
fury of the blast. The popularity which the simile of 
the angel enjoyed among Addison's contemporaries has 
always seemed to us to be a remarkable instance of the 
advantage which, in rhetoric and poetry, the particular 
has over the general. ^^ 

Soon after the Campaign, was published Addison's 
Narrative of his Travels in Italy. The first effect pro- 
duced by this Narrative was disappointment. The 
crowd of readers who expected politics and scandal, 
speculations on the projects of Victor Amadeus, and 
anecdotes about the jollities of convents and the 
amours of cardinals and nuns, were confounded by find- 



ADDISON. 117 

ing that the writer's mind was much more occupied by 
the war between the Trojans and Eutulians than by the 
war between France and Austria; and that he seemed 
to have heard no scandal of later date than the gal- 
lantries of the Empress Faustina. In time, however, 
the judgment of the many was overruled by that of the 
few; and, before the book was reprinted, it was so 
eagerly sought that it sold for five times the original 
price. It is still read with pleasure : the style is pure 
and flowing; the classical quotations and allusions are 
numerous and happy; and we are now and then 
charmed by that singularly humane and delicate hu- 
mor in which Addison excelled all men. Yet this 
agreeable work, even when considered merely as the 
history of a literary tour, may justly be censured on 
account of its faults of omission. We have already 
said that, though rich in extracts from the Latin poets, 
it contains scarcely any references to the Latin 
orators and historians. We must add that it contains 
little or rather no information respecting the history 
and literature of modern Italy. To the best of our re- 
membrance, Addison does not mention Dante, Pe- 
trarch, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, 
or Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he 
saw the tomb of Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard 
the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso. But for Tasso 
and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus 
and Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ti- 
cin brings a line of Silius to his mind. The sulphur- 
ous steam of Albula suggests to him several passages 
of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the illus- 
trious dead of Santa Croce ; -^ he crosses the wood of 
Eavenna without recollecting the Spectre Huntsman, 



118 MACAULAY'S 

and wanders up and down Eimini without one thought 
of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an intro- 
duction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at 
all aware that at Florence he was in the vicinity of a 
poet with whom Boileau could not sustain a com- 
parison, of the greatest lyric poet of modern times, 
Yincenzio Filicaja. This is the more remarkable, 
because Filicaja was the favorite poet of the accom- 
plished Somers, under whose protection Addison trav- 
elled, and to whom the account of the Travels is dedi- 
cated. The truth is, that Addison knew little, and 
cared less, about the literature of modern Italy. His 
favorite models were Latin. His favorite critics were 
French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he had read 
seemed to him monstrous, and the other half tawdry. 
His Travels were followed by the lively opera of 
Rosamond. This piece was ill set to music, and there- 
fore failed on the stage, but it completely succeeded in 
print, and is indeed excellent in its kind. The smooth- 
ness with which the verses glide, and the elasticity with 
which they bound, is, to our ears at least, very pleasing. 
We are inclined to think that if Addison had left heroic 
couplets to Pope, and blank verse to Rowe, and had 
employed himself in writing airy and spirited songs, 
his reputation as a poet would have stood far higher 
than it now does. Some years after his death, Rosa- 
mond was set to nevr music by Doctor Arne, and was 
performed with complete success. Several passages 
long retained their popularity, and were daily sung, 
during the latter part of George the Second's reign, at 
all the harpsichords in England. 

'y^ While Addison thus amused himself, his prospects, 
and the prospects of his party, were constantly becom- 



ADDISON. 119 

ing brighter and brighter. In the spring of 1705, the 
ministers were freed from the restraint imposed by a 
House of Commons in which the Tories of the most 
perverse class had the ascendancy. The elections were 
favorable to the Whigs. The coalition which had been 
tacitly and gradually formed was now openly avowed. 
The Great Seal was given to Cowper. Somers and 
Halifax were sworn of the council. Halifax was sent 
in the following year to carry the decorations of the 
Order of the Garter to the Electoral Prince of Hano- 
ver, and was accompanied on this honorable mission 
by Addison, who had just been made Under-secretary 
of State. The Secretary of State under whom Addi- 
son first served was Sir Charles Hedges, a Tory. But 
Hedges was soon dismissed to make room for the most 
vehement of Whigs, Charles, Earl of Sunderland. In 
every department of the State, indeed, the High 
Churchmen were compelled to give place to their oppo- 
nents. At the close of 1707, the Tories who still re- 
mained in office strove to rally, with Harley at their 
head. But the attempt, though favored by the queen, 
who had always been a Tory at heart, and who had now 
quarrelled with the Duchess of Marlborough, was un- 
successful. The time was not yet. The Captain Gen- 
eral was at the height of popularity and glory. The 
Low Church party had a majority in Parliament. The 
country squires and rectors, though occasionally utter- 
ing a savage growl, were for the most part in a state of 
torpor, which lasted till they were roused into activity, 
and indeed into madness, by the prosecution of Sache- 
verell. Harley and his adherents were compelled to 
retire. The victory of the Whigs was complete. At 
the general election of 1708 their strength in the 



120 MACAULAY'S 

House of Commons became irresistible: and, before 
the end of that year, Somers was made Lord President 
of the Council, and Wharton Lord Lieutenant of Ire- 
land. 

Addison sat for Malmsbury in the House of Com- 
mons which was elected in 1708. But the House of 
Commons was not the field for him. The bashfulness 
of his nature made his wit and eloquence useless in 
debate. He once rose, but could not overcome his 
diffidence, and ever after remained silent. Nobody 
can think it strange that a great writer should fail as 
a speaker. But many, probably, will think it strange 
that Addison's failure as a speaker should have had 
no unfavorable effect on his success as a politician. In 
our time, a man of high rank and great fortune might, 
though speaking very little and very ill, hold a consid- 
erable post. But it would now be inconceivable that a 
mere adventurer, a man who, when out of office must 
live by his pen, should in a few years become succes- 
sively Under-Secretary of State, Chief Secretary for 
Ireland, and Secretary of State, without some oratori- 
cal talent. Addison, without high birth, and with 
little property, rose to a post which dukes, the heads 
of the great houses of Talbot, Eussell, and Bentinck 
have thought it an honor to fill. Without opening his 
lips in debate, he rose to a post the highest that Chat- 
ham or Fox ever reached. And this he did before he 
had been nine years in Parliament. We must look for 
the explanation of this seeming miracle to the peculiar 
circumstances in which that generation was placed. 
During the interval which elapsed between the time 
when the censorship of the Press ceased, and the time 
when parliamentary proceedings began to be freely re- 



ADDISON. 121 

ported, literary talents were, to a public man, of much 
more importance, and oratorical talents of much less 
importance, than in our time. At present the best 
way of giving rapid and wide publicity to a fact or an 
argument is to introduce that fact or argument into 
a speech made in Parliament. If a political tract were 
to appear superior to the Conduct of the Allies, or to 
the best numbers of the Freeholder, the circulation of 
such a tract would be languid indeed when compared 
with the circulation of every remarkable word uttered 
in the deliberations of the legislature. A speech made 
in the House of Commons at four in the morning is on 
thirty thousand tables before ten. A speech made on 
the Monday is read on the Wednesday by multitudes in 
Antrim and Aberdeenshire. The orator, by the help of 
the shorthand writer, has to a great extent superseded 
the pamphleteer. It was not so in the reign of Anne. 
The best speech could then produce no effect except on 
those who heard it. It was only by means of the press 
that the opinion of the public without doors could be 
influenced; and the opinion of the public v/ithout 
doors could not but be of the highest importance in 
a country governed by parliaments, and indeed at that 
time governed by triennial parliaments. The pen was, 
therefore, a more formidable political engine than the 
tongue. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox contended only in Par- 
liament. But Walpole and Pulteney, the Pitt and 
Fox of an earlier period, had not done half of what was 
necessary when they sat down amidst the acclamations 
of the House of Commons. They had still to plead 
their cause before the country, and this they could do 
only by means of the press. Their works are now for- 
gotten. But it is certain that there were in Grub 



122 MACAULAY'S 

Street ^^ few more assiduous scribblers of Thoughts, 
Letters, Answers, Remarks, than these two great chiefs 
of parties. Pulteney, when leader of the opposition, and 
possessed of thirty thousand a year, edited The Crafts- 
man. Walpole, though not a man of literary habits, 
was the author of at least ten pamphlets, and retouched 
and corrected many more. These facts sufficiently 
show of how great importance literary assistance then 
was to the contending parties. St. John was, certainly 
in Anne's reign, the best Tory speaker; Cowper was 
probably the best Whig speaker. But it may well be 
doubted whether St. John did so much for the Tories 
as Swift, and whether Cowper did so much for the 
Whigs as Addison. When these things are duly con- 
sidered, it will be thought strange that Addison should 
have climbed higher in the State than any other Eng- 
lishman has ever, by means merely of literary talents, 
been able to climb. Swift would, in all probability, 
have climbed as high, if he had not been encumbered 
by his cassock and his pudding sleeves. As far as the 
homage of the great went. Swift had as much of it as if 
he had been Lord Treasurer. 

To the influence which Addison derived from his 
literary talents was added all the influence which arises 
from character. The world, always ready to think the 
worst of needy political adventurers, was forced to 
make one exception. Eestlessness, violence, audacity, 
laxity of principle, are the vices ordinarily attributed 
to that class of men. But faction itself could not deny 
that Addison had, through all clianges of fortune, been 
strictly faithful to his early opinions and to his early 
friends ; that his integrity was without stain ; that his 
whole deportment indicated a fine sense of the becom- 



ADDISON. 123 

ing; that, in the utmost heat of controversy, his zeal 
was tempered by a regard for truth, humanity, and so- 
cial decorum; that no outrage could ever provoke him 
to retaliation unworthy of a Christian and a gentle- 
man ; and that his only faults were a too sensitive deli- 
cacy, and a modesty which amounted to bashfulness. 

He was undoubtedly one of the most popular men 
of his time; and much of his popularity he owed, we 
believe, to that very timidity which his friends la- 
mented. That timidity often prevented him from ex- 
hibiting his talents to the best advantage. But it pro- 
pitiated Nemesis. It averted that envy which would 
otherwise have been excited by fame so splendid, and 
by so rapid an elevation. No man is so great a favorite 
with the public as he who is at once an object of ad- 
miration, of respect, and of pity; and such were the 
feelings which Addison inspired. Those who enjoyed 
the privilege of hearing his familiar conversation de- 
clared with one voice that it was superior even to his 
writings. The brilliant Mary Montague said that she 
had known all the wits, and that Addison was the best 
company in the world. The malignant Pope was 
forced to own that there was a charm in Addison's talk 
which could be found nowhere else. Swift, when 
burning with animosity against the Wliigs, could not 
but confess to Stella that, after all, he had never known 
any associate so agreeable as Addison. Steele, an ex- 
cellent judge of lively conversation, said that the con- 
versation of Addison was at once the most polite and 
the most mirthful that could be imagined ; that it was 
Terence and Catullus in one, heightened by an ex- 
quisite something which was neither Terence nor Ca- 
tullus, but Addison alone. Young, an excellent judge 
10 



124 MACAULAY'S 

of serious conversation, said that when Addison was at 
his ease, he went on in a noble strain of thought and 
language, so as to chain the attention of every hearer. 
Nor were Addison's great colloquial powers more ad- 
mirable than the courtesy and softness of heart which 
appeared in his conversation. At the same time, it 
would be too much to say that he was wholly devoid of 
the malice which is, perhaps, inseparable from a keen 
sense of the ludicrous. He had one habit which both 
Swift and Stella applauded, and which we hardly know 
how to blame. If his first attempts to set a presuming 
dunce right were ill received, he changed his tone, " as- 
sented with civil leer," and lured the flattered cox- 
comb deeper and deeper into absurdity. That such 
was his practice, we should, we think, have guessed 
from his works. The Tatler's criticisms on Mr. Soft- 
ly's sonnet, and The Spectator's dialogue with the poli- 
tician who is so zealous for the honor of Lady Q — p — t 
— s, are excellent specimens of this innocent mischief. 

Such were Addison's talents for conversation. But 
his rare gifts were not exhibited to crowds or to stran- 
gers. As soon as he entered a large company, as soon 
as he saw an unknown face, his lips were sealed, and 
his manners became constrained. None who met him 
only in great assemblies would have been able to believe 
that he was the same man who had often kept a few 
friends listening and laughing round a table, from the 
time when the play ended till the clock of St. Paul's in 
Covent Garden struck four. Yet, even at such a table, 
he was not seen to the best advantage. To enjoy his 
conversation in the highest perfection, it was necessary 
to be alone with him, and to hear him, in his own 
phrase, think aloud. " There is no such thing," he 



ADDISON. .. 125 

used to say, " as real conversation, but between two 
persons." 
A^- This timidity, a timidity surely neither ungraceful 
^ nor unamiable, led Addison into the two most serious 
faults which can with justice be imputed to him. He 
found that wine broke the spell which lay on his fine 
intellect, and was therefore too easily seduced into con- 
vivial excess. Such excess was in that age regarded, 
even by grave men, as the most venial of all peccadil- 
loes, and was so far from being a mark of ill breeding 
that it was almost essential to the character of a fine 
gentleman. But the smallest speck is seen on a white 
ground; and almost all the biographers of Addison 
have said something about this failing. Of any other 
statesman or writer of Queen Anne's reign we should 
no more think of saying that he sometimes took too 
much wine than that he wore a long wig and a sword. 
' ' To the excessive modest}^ of Addison's nature we 
must ascribe another fault which generally arises from 
a very different cause. He became a little too fond of 
seeing himself surrounded by a small circle of admir- 
ers, to whom he was as a king, or rather as a god. All 
these men were far inferior to him in ability, and some 
of them had very serious faults. N'or did these faults 
escape his observation; for, if ever there was an eye 
which saw through and through men, it was the eye 
of Addison. But, with the keenest observation, and 
the finest sense of the ridiculous, he had a large char- 
ity. The feeling with which he looked on most of his 
humble companions was one of benevolence, slightly 
tinctured with contempt. He was at perfect ease in 
their company; he was grateful for their devoted at- 
tachment; and he loaded them with benefits. Their 



126 MACAULAY'S 

veneration for him appears to have exceeded that with 
which Johnson was regarded by Boswell, or Warburton 
by Hurd. It was not in the power of adulation to turn 
such a head, or deprave such a heart, as Addison's. 
But it must in -candor be admitted that he contracted 
some of the faults which can scarcely be avoided by 
any person who is so unfortunate as to be the oracle of 
a small literary coterie. 

One member of this little society was Eustace Bud- 
gell, a young Templar of some literature, and a distant 
relation of Addison. There was at this time no stain 
on the character of Budgell, and it is not improbable 
that his career would have been prosperous and honor- 
able, if the life of his cousin had been prolonged. But , 
when the' master was laid in the grave, the disciple 
broke loose from all restraint, descended rapidly fiom 
one degree of vice and misery to another, ruined his 
fortune by follies, attempted to repair it by crimes, 
and at length closed a wicked and unhappy life by self- 
murder. Yet, to the last, the wretched man, gambler, 
lampooner, cheat," forger, as he was, retained his affec- 
tion and veneration for Addison, and recorded those 
feelings in the last lines which he traced before he hid 
himself from infamy under London Bridge. 

Another of Addison's favorite companions was Am- 
brose Philips, a good Whig and a middling poet, who 
had the honor of bringing into fashion a species of 
composition which has been called, after his name, 
Namby Pamby. But the most remarkable members of 
the little senate, as Pope long afterward called it, 
were Eichard Steele and Thomas Tickell. 

Steele had known Addison from childhood. They 
had been together at the Charter House and at Ox- 



ADDISON. 127 

ford; but circumstances had then, for a time, sepa- 
rated them widely. Steele had left college without 
taking a degree, had been disinherited by a rich rela- 
tion, had led a vagrant life, had served in the army, 
had tried to find the philosopher's stone, and had writ- 
ten a religious treatise and several comedies. He was 
one of those people whom it is impossible either to hate 
or to respect. His temper was sweet, his affections 
warm, his spirits lively, his passions strong, and his 
principles weak. His life was spent in sinning and re- 
penting; in inculcating what was right, and doing 
what was wrong. In speculation, he was a man of 
piety and honor ; in practice, he was much of the rake 
and a little of the swindler. He was, however, so good- 
natured that it was not easy to be seriously angry with 
him, and that even rigid moralists felt more inclined to 
pity than to blame him, when he diced himself into a 
spunging house ^^ or drank himself into a fever. Ad- 
dison regarded Steele with kindness not unmingled 
with scorn, tried, with little success, to keep him out 
of scrapes, introduced him to the -great, procured a 
good place for him, corrected his plays, and, though by 
no means rich, lent him large sums of money. One 
of these loans appears, from a letter dated in August, 
1708, to have amounted to a thousand pounds. These 
pecuniary transactions probably led to frequent bick- 
erings. It is said that, on one occasion, Steele's negli- 
gence, or dishonesty, provoked Addison to repay him- 
self by the help of a bailiff. We cannot join with Miss 
Aikin in rejecting this story. Johnson heard it from 
Savage, who heard it from Steele. Few private trans- 
actions which took place a hundred and twenty years 
ago are proved by stronger evidence than this. But 



128 MACAULAY'S ' 

we can by no means agree with those who condemn 
Addison's severity. The most amiable of mankind 
may well be moved to indignation, when what he has 
earned hardly, and lent with great inconvenience to 
himself, for the purpose of relieving a friend in dis- 
tress, is squandered with insane profusion. We will 
illustrate our meaning by an example, which is not the 
less striking because it is taken from fiction. Dr. Har- 
rison, in Fielding's Amelia, is represented as the most 
benevolent of human beings ; yet he takes in execution, 
not only the goods, but the person of his friend Booth. 
Dr. Harrison resorts to this strong measure because he 
has been informed that Booth, while pleading poverty 
as an excuse for not paying just debts, had been buying 
fine jewellery and setting up a coach. No person who 
is well acquainted with Steele's life and corresponderce 
can doubt that he behaved quite as ill to Addison as 
Booth was accused of behaving to Dr. Harrison. The 
real history, we have little doubt, was something like 
this: A letter comes to Addison, imploring help in 
pathetic terms, and promising reformation and speedy 
repayment. Poor Dick declares that he has not an 
inch of candle, or a bushel of coals, or credit with the 
butcher for a shoulder of mutton. Addison is moved. 
He determines to deny himself some medals which are 
wanting to his series of the Twelve Caesars ; to put off 
buying the new edition of Bayle's Dictionary; and to 
wear his old sword and buckles another year. In this 
way he manages to send a hundred pounds to his 
friend. The next day he calls on Steele, and finds 
scores of gentlemen and ladies assembled. The fiddles 
are playing. The table is groaning under champagne, 
burgundy, and pyramids of sweetmeats. Is it strange 



ADDISON. 129 

that a man whose kindness is thus abused should send 
sheriff's officers to reclaim what is due to him ? 

Tickell was a young man, fresh from Oxford, who 
had introduced himself to public notice by writing a 
most ingenious and graceful little poem in praise of 
the opera of Eosamond. He deserved, and at length 
attained, the first place in Addison's friendship. For 
a time Steele and Tickell were on good terms. But 
they loved Addison too much to love each other, and at 
length became as bitter enemies as the rival bulls in 
Virgil. 

At the close of 1708, Wharton became Lord Lieu- 
tenant of Ireland, and appointed Addison Chief Secre- 
tary. Addison was consequently under the necessity of 
quitting London for Dublin. Besides the chief secre- 
taryship, which was then worth about two thousand 
pounds a year, he obtained a patent appointing him 
keeper of the Irish Eecords for life, with a salary of 
three or four hundred a year. Budgell accompanied 
his cousin in the capacity of private secretary. 

Wharton and Addison had nothing in common but 
Whiggism. The Lord Lieutenant was not only licen- 
tious and corrupt, but was distinguished from other 
libertines and jobbers by a callous impudence which 
presented the strongest contrast to the Secretary's gen- 
tleness and delicacy. Many parts of the Irish admin- 
istration at this time appear to have deserved serious 
blame. But against Addison there was not a murmur. 
He long afterward asserted, what all the evidence 
which we have ever seen tends to prove, that his dili- 
gence and integrity gained the friendship of all the 
most considerable persons in Ireland. 

The parliamentary career of Addison in Ireland 



\\ 



130 MACAULAY'S 

has, we think, wholly escaped the notice of all his biog- 
raphers. He was elected member for the borough of 
Cavan in the summer of 1709; and in the journals of 
two sessions his name frequently occurs. Some of the 
entries appear to indicate that he so far overcame his 
timidity as to make speeches. Nor is this by any 
means improbable; for the Irish House of Commons 
was a far less formidable audience than the English 
House; and many tongues which were tied by fear in 
greater assembly became fluent in the smaller. Gerard 
Hamilton, for example, who, from fear of losing the 
fame gained by his single speech, sat mute at West- 
minster during forty years, spoke with great effect at 
Dublin when he was secretary to Lord Halifax. 

While Addison was in Ireland, an event occurred to 
which he owes his high and permanent rank among 
British writers. As yet his fame rested on perform- 
ances which, though highly respectable, were not built 
for duration, and which would, if he had produced 
nothing else, have now been almost forgotten, on. some 
excellent Latin verses, on some English verses which 
occasionally rose above mediocrity, and on a book of 
travels, agreeably written, but not indicating any ex- 
traordinary powers of mind. These works showed 
him to be a man of taste, sense, and learning. The 
time had come when he was to prove himself a man 
of genius, and to enrich our literature with composi- 
tions which will live as long as the English language. 

In the spring of 1709, Steele formed a literary 
project, of which he was far indeed from foresee- 
ing the consequences. Periodical papers had during 
many years been published in London. Most of 
these were political; but in some of them questions 



ADDISON. 131 

of morality, taste, and love casuistry had been dis- 
cussed. The literary merit of these works was small 
indeed; and even their names are now known only to 
the curious. 

i i; Steele had been appointed gazetteer by Sunder- 
land, at the request, it is said, of Addison, and thus 
had access to foreign intelligence earlier and more 
authentic than was in those times within the reach of 
an ordinary news-writer. This circumstance seems to 
have suggested to him the scheme of publishing a 
periodical paper on a new plan. It was to appear on 
the days on which the post left London for the country, 
which were, in that generation, the Tuesdays, Thurs- 
days, and Saturdays. It was to contain the foreign 
news, accounts of theatrical representations, and the 
literary gossip of Will's and of the Grecian. It was 
also to contain remarks on the fashionable topics of 
the day, compliments to beauties, pasquinades on noted 
sharpers, and criticisms on popular preachers. The 
aim of Steele does not appear to have been at first 
higher than this. He was not ill qualified to conduct 
the work which he had planned. His public intelli- 
gence he drew from the best sources. He knew the 
town, and had paid dear for his knowledge. He had 
read much more than the dissipated men of that time 
were in the habit of reading. He was a rake among 
scholars, and a scholar among rakes. His style was 
easy and not incorrect, and, though his wit and humor 
were of no high order, his gay animal spirits imparted 
to his compositions an air of vivacity which ordinary 
readers could hardly distinguish from comic genius. 
His writinsrs have been well compared to those light 
wines which, though deficient in body and flavor, are 



132 MACATJLAY'S 

yet a pleasant small drink, if not kept too long or car- 
ried too far. 

Isaac Bickerstaff/^ Esquire, Astrologer, was an 
imaginary person, almost as well known in that age as 
Mr. Paul Pry or Mr. Samuel Pickwick in ours. Swift 
had assumed the name of Bickerstaff in a satirical pam- 
phlet against Partridge, the maker of almanacs. Par- 
tridge had been fool enough to publish a furious reply. 
Bickerstaff had rejoined in a second pamphlet still 
more diverting than the first. All the wits had com- 
bined to keep up the joke, and the town was long in 
convulsions of laughter. Steele determined to employ 
the name which this controversy had made popular; 
and, in April, 1709, it was announced that Isaac 
Bickerstaff, Esquire, Astrologer, was about to pub- 
lish a paper called the Tatler. 

f\ [/ Addison had not been consulted about this scheme ; 
\ but as soon as he heard of it, he determined to give 
his assistance. The effect of that assistance cannot 
be better described than in Steele's own words. " I 
fared," he said, " like a distressed prince who calls in 
a powerful neighbor to his aid. I was undone by my 
auxiliary. When I had once called him in, I could 
not subsist without dependence on him." " The 
paper," he says elsewhere, " was advanced indeed. It 
was raised to a greater thing than I intended it." 

^y^ It is probable that Addison, when he sent across 

St. George's Channel his first contributions to the 
Tatler, had no notion of the extent and variety of his 
own powers. He was the possessor of a vast mine, rich 
with a hundred ores. But he had been acquainted 
only with the least precious part of his treasures, and 
had hitherto contented himself with producing some- 



ADDISON. 133 

times copper and sometimes lead, intermingled with a 
little silver. All at once, and by mere accident, he 
had lighted on an inexhaustible vein of the finest gold. 

The mere choice and arrangement of his words 
would have sufficed to make his essays classical. For 
never, not even by Dryden, not even by Temple, had 
the English language been written with such sweetness, 
grace, and facility. But this was the smallest part 
of Addison's praise. Had he clothed his thoughts in 
the half French style of Horace Walpole, or in the 
half Latin style of Dr. Johnson, or in the half Ger- 
man jargon of the present day,^^ his genius would 
have triumphed over all faults of manner. As a moral 
satirist he stands unrivalled. If ever the best Tat- 
lers and Spectators were equalled in their own kind, 
we should be inclined to guess that it must have been 
by the lost comedies of Menander. 

In wit, properly so called, Addison was not inferior 
to Cowley or Butler. No single ode of Cowley con- 
tains so many happy analogies as are crowded into 
the lines to Sir Godfrey Kneller; and we would under- 
take to collect from the Spectators as great a number 
of ingenious illustrations as can be found in Hudibras. 
The still higher faculty of invention x4ddison possessed 
in still larger measure. The numerous fictions, gen- 
erally original, often wild and grotesque, but always 
singularly graceful and happy, which are found in his 
essays, fully entitle him to the rank of a great poet, 
a rank to which his metrical compositions give him 
no claim. As an observer of life, of manners, of all 
the shades of human character, he stands in the first 
class. And what he observed he had the art of com- 
municating in two widely different ways. He could 



134 MACAULAY'S 

describe virtues, vices, habits, whims, as well as Claren- 
don. But he could do something better. He could 
call human beings into existence, and make them ex- 
hibit themselves. If we wish to find anything more 
vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go either 
to Shakespeare or to Cervantes. 

But what shall we say of Addison's humor, of his 
sense of the ludicrous, of his power of awakening that 
sense in others, and of drawing mirth from incidents 
which occur every day, and from little peculiarities of 
temper and manner, such as may be found in every 
man? We feel the charm; we give ourselves up to it; 
but we strive in vain to analyze it. 

Perhaps the best way of describing Addison's 
peculiar pleasantry is to compare it with the pleasantry 
of some other greaf satirists. The three most eminent 
masters of the art of ridicule, during the eighteenth 
century, were, we conceive, Addison, Swift, and Vol- 
taire. Which of the three had the greatest power of 
moving laughter may be questioned. But each of 
them, within his own domain, was supreme, 

Voltaire is the prince of buffoons. His merriment 
is without disguise or restraint. He gambols ; he grins ; 
he shakes his sides; he points the finger; he turns up 
the nose; he shoots out the tongue. The manner of 
Swift is the very opposite to this. He moves laughter, 
but never joins in it. He appears in his works such as 
he appeared in society. All the company are con- 
vulsed with merriment, while the dean, the author 
of all the mirth, preserves an invincible gravity, and 
even sourness of aspect, and gives utterance to the 
most eccentric and ludicrous fancies, with the air of 
a man reading the commination service. 



ADDISON. 135 

The manner of Addison is as remote from that 
of Swift as from that of Voltaire. He neither laughs 
out like the French wit, nor, like the Irish wit, throws 
a double portion of severity into his countenance while 
laughing inwardly; but preserves a look peculiarly his 
own, a look of demure serenity, disturbed only by an 
arch sparkle of the eye, an almost imperceptible eleva- 
tion of the brow, an almost imperceptible curl of the 
lip. His tone is never that either of a Jack Pudding 
or of a Cynic. It is that of a gentleman, in whom 
the quickest sense of the ridiculous is constantly tem- 
pered by good nature and good breeding. 

We own that the humor of Addison is, in our opin- 
ion, of a more delicious flavor than the humor of either 
Swift or Voltaire. Thus much, at least, is certain 
that both Swift and Voltaire have been successfully 
mimicked, and that no man has yet been able to mimic 
Addison. The letter of the Abbe Coyer to Pansophe 
is Voltaire all over, and imposed, during a long time, 
on the Academicians of Paris. There are passages in 
Arbuthnot's satirical works which we, at least, cannot 
distinguish from Swift^s best writing. But of the 
many eminent men who have made Addison their 
model, though several have copied his mere diction 
with happy effect, none has been able to catch the tone 
of his pleasantry. In the World, in the Connoisseur, 
in the Mirror, in the Lounger, there are numerous 
papers written in obvious imitation of his Tatlers and 
Spectators. Most of those papers have some merit; 
many are very lively and amusing; but there is not 
a single one which could be passed off as Addison's 
on a critic of the smallest perspicacity. 

But that which chiefly distinguishes Addison from 



136 MAC AULA Y'S 

Swift, from Voltaire, from almost all the other great 
masters of ridicule, is the grace, the nobleness, the 
moral purity, which we find even in his merriment. 
Severity, gradually hardening and darkening into mis- 
anthropy, characterizes the works of Swift. The 
nature of Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman; but he 
venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of 
the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great 
First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, 
could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The 
more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey- 
like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of 
Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles ; the mirth of 
Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns 
oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of seraphim 
and just men made perfect be derived from an ex- 
quisite perception of the ludicrous, their mirth must 
surely be none other than the mirth of Addison: a 
mirth consistent with tender compassion for all that 
is frail, and with profound reverence for all that is 
sublime. Nothing great, nothing amiable, no moral 
duty, no doctrine of natural or revealed religion, has 
ever been associated by Addison with any degrading 
idea. His humanity is without a parallel in literary 
history. The highest proof of virtue is t6' possess 
boundless power without abusing it. No kind of 
power is more formidable than the power of making 
men ridiculous; and that power Addison possessed 
in boundless measure. How grossly that power was 
abused by Swift and by Voltaire is well known. But 
of Addison it may be confidently affirmed that he has 
blackened no man's character, nay, that it would be 
difficult, if not impossible, to find in all the volumes 



ADDISON. IST 

which he has left us a single taunt which can be called 
ungenerous or unkind. Yet he had detractors, whose 
malignity might have seemed to justify as terrible a 
revenge as that which men, not superior to him in 
genius, wreaked on Bettesworth and on Franc de Pom- 
pigan. He was a politician; he was the best writer 
of his party; he lived in times of fierce excitement, 
in times when persons of high character and station 
stooped to scurrility such as is now practised only 
by the basest of mankind. Yet no provocation 
and no example could induce him to return railing 
for railing. 

Of the service which his essays rendered to morality 
it is difficult to speak too highly. It is true that, when 
the Tatler appeared, that age of outrageous profane- 
ness and licentiousness which followed the Restora- 
tion had passed away. Jeremy Collier had shamed the 
theatres into something which, compared with the 
excesses of Etherege and Wycherley, might be called 
decency. Yet there still lingered in the public mind 
a pernicious notion that there was some connection 
between genius and profligacy, between the domestic 
virtues and the sullen formality of the Puritans. That 
error it is the glory of Addison to have dispelled. He 
taught the nation that the faith and the morality of 
Hale and Tillotson might be found in company with 
wit more sparkling than the wit of Congreve, and with 
humor richer than the humor of Vanbrugh. So effec- 
tually, indeed, did he retort on vice the mockery which 
had recently been directed against virtue, that, since 
his time, the open violation of decency has always been 
considered among us as the mark of a fool. And this 
revolution, the greatest and most salutary ever effected 



13S MACAULAY'S 

by any satirist, he accomplished, be it remembered, 
without writing one personal lampoon. 

In the early contributions of Addison to the Tatler 
his peculiar powers were not fully exhibited. Yet, 
from the first, his superiority to all his coadjutors was 
evident. Some of his later Tatlers are fully equal 
to anything that he ever wrote. Among the portraits, 
we most admire Tom Folio, Ned Softly, and the Po- 
litical Upholsterer. The Proceedings of the Court 
of Honor, the Thermometer of Zeal, the Story of the 
Frozen Words, the Memoirs of the Shilling, are ex- 
cellent specimens of that ingenious and lively species 
of fiction in which Addison excelled all men. There 
is one still better paper, of the same class. But though 
that paper, a hundred and thirty-three years ago, was 
probably thought as edifying as one of Smalridge's 
sermons, we dare not indicate it to the squeamish 
readers of the nineteenth century. 

During the session of Parliament which commenced 
in November, 1709, and which the impeachment of 
Sacheverell has made memorable, Addison appears to 
have resided in London. The Tatler was now more 
popular than any periodical paper had ever been ; and 
his connection with it was generally known. It was 
not known, however, that almost everything good in 
the Tatler was his. The truth is, that the fifty or sixty 
numbers which we owe to him were not merely the 
best, but so decidedly the best that any five of them are 
more valuable than all the two hundred numbers in 
which he had no share. 

He required, at this time, all the solace which he 
could derive from literary success. The queen had 
always disliked the Whigs. She had during some 



ADDISON. 139 

years disliked the Marlborough family. But, reign- 
ing by a disputed title, she could not venture directly 
to oppose herself to a majority of both Houses of Par- 
liament ; and, engaged as she was in a war on the event 
of which her own crown was staked, she could not 
venture to disgrace a great and successful general. 
But at length, in the year 1710, the causes which had 
restrained her from showing her aversion to the Low 
Church party ceased to operate. The trial of Sachev- 
erell produced an outbreak of public feeling scarcely 
less violent than the outbreaks which we can ourselves 
remember in 1820 and in 1831. The country gentle- 
men, the country clergymen, the rabble of the towns, 
were all, for once, on the same side. It was clear that, 
if a general election took place before the excitement 
abated, the Tories would have a majority. The serv- 
ices of Marlborough had been so splendid that they 
were no longer necessary. The queen's throne was 
secure from all attack on the part of Lewis. Indeed, 
it seemed much more likely that the English and Ger- 
man armies would divide the spoils of Versailles and 
Marli than that a marshal of France would bring back 
the Pretender to St. James's. The queen, acting by 
the advice of Harley, determined to dismiss her serv- 
ants. In June the change commenced. Sunderland 
was the first who fell. The Tories exulted over his 
fall. The Whigs tried, during a few Aveeks, to persuade 
themselves that her majesty had acted only from per- 
sonal dislike to the secretary, and that she meditated 
no further alteration. But, early in August, Godol- 
phin was surprised by a letter from Anne, which 
directed him to break his white staff. Even after this 
event, the irresolution or dissimulation of Harley kept 
11 



140 MACAULAY'S 

up the hopes of the Whigs during another month; 
and then the ruin became rapid and violent. The Par- 
liament was dissolved. The ministers were turned 
out. The Tories were called to office. The tide of 
popularity ran violently in favor of the High Church 
party. That party, feeble in the late House of Com- 
mons, was now irresistible. The power which the 
Tories had thus suddenly acquired, they used with 
blind and stupid ferocity. The howl which the whole 
pack set up for prey and for blood appalled even him 
who had roused and unchained them. When, at this 
distance of time, we calmly review the conduct of the 
discarded ministers, we cannot but feel a movement 
of indignation at the injustice with which they were 
treated. No body of men had ever administered the 
government with more energy, ability, and modera- 
tion ; and their success had been proportioned to their 
wisdom. They had saved Holland and Germany. 
They had humbled France. They had, as it seemed, 
all but torn Spain from the hoase of Bourbon. They 
had made England the first power in Europe. At 
home they had united England and Scotland. They 
had respected the rights of conscience and the liberty 
of the subject. They retired, leaving their country at 
the height of prosperity and glory. And yet they were 
pursued to their retreat by such a roar of obloquy as 
was never raised against the Government which threw 
away thirteen colonies, or against the Government 
which sent a gallant army to perish in the ditches of 
Walcheren. 

None of the Whigs suffered more in the general 
wreck than Addison. He had just sustained some 
heavy pecuniary losses, of the nature of which we are 



ADDISON. 141 

imperfectly informed, when his secretaryship was 
taken from him. He had reason to believe that he 
should also be deprived of the small Irish office which 
he held by patent. He had just resigned his fellow- 
ship. It seems probable that he had already ventured 
to raise his eyes to a great lady, and that, while his 
political friends were in power, and while his own for- 
tunes were rising, he had been, in the phrase of the 
romances which were then fashionable, permitted to 
hope. But Mr. Addison the ingenious writer and Mr. 
Addison the chief secretary were, in her ladyship's 
opinion, two very different persons. All these calami- 
ties united, however, could not disturb the serene 
cheerfulness of a mind conscious of innocence, and rich 
in its own wealth. He told his friends, with smiling 
resignation, that they ought to admire his philosophy ; 
that he had lost at once his fortune, his place, his fel- 
lowship, and his mistress ; that he must think of turn- 
ing tutor again, and yet that his spirits were as good 
as ever. 

He had one consolation. Of the unpopularity 
which his friends had incurred, he had no share. Such 
was the esteem with which he was regarded, that, while 
the most violent measures were taken for the purpose 
of forcing Tory members on Whig corporations, he was 
returned to Parliament without even a contest. Swift, 
who was now in London, and who had already deter- 
mined on quitting the Whigs, wrote to Stella in these 
remarkable words : " The Tories carry it among the 
new members six to one. Mr. Addison's election has 
passed easy and undisputed; and I believe if he had 
a mind to be king, he would hardly be refused." 

The good-will with which the Tories regarded Ad- 



142 MACAULAY'S 

dison is the more honorable to him, because it had not 
been purchased by any concession on his part. Dur- 
ing the general election he published a political jour- 
nal, entitled the Whig Examiner. Of that journal 
it may be sufficient to say that Johnson, in spite of 
his strong political prejudices, pronounced it to be 
superior in wit to any of Swift's writings on the other 
side. When it ceased to appear. Swift, in a letter to 
Stella, expressed his exultation at the death of so 
formidable an antagonist. " He might well rejoice," 
says Johnson, " at the death of that which he could 
not have killed." " On no occasion," he adds, " was 
the genius of Addison more vigorously exerted, and 
on none did the superiority of his powers more evi- 
dently appear." 

The only use which Addison appears to have made 
of the favor with which he was regarded by the Tories 
was to save some of his friends from the general ruin 
of the Whig party. He felt himself to be in a situation 
which made it his duty to take a decided part in poli- 
tics. But the case of Steele and of Ambrose Philips 
was different. For Philips, Addison even conde- 
scended to solicit, with what success we have not ascer- 
tained. Steele held two places. He was gazetteer, 
and he was also a commissioner of stamps. The 
Gazette was taken from him. But he was suffered to 
retain his place in the Stamp Office, on an implied 
understanding that he should not be active against 
the new Government; and he was, during more than 
two years, induced by Addison to observe this armistice 
with tolerable fidelity. 

Isaac Bickerstaff accordingly became silent upon 
politics, and the article of news, which had once 



ADDISON. 143 

formed about one-third of his paper, altogether dis- 
appeared. The Tatler had completely changed its 
character. It was now nothing but a series of essays 
on books, morals, and manners. Steele therefore re- 
solved to bring it to a close, and to commence a new 
work on an improved plan. It was announced that 
this new work would be published daily. The under- 
taking was generally regarded as bold, or rather rash; 
but the event amply justified the confidence with 
which Steele relied on the fertility of Addison's genius. 
On the second of January, 1711, appeared the last 
Tatler. At the beginning of March following appeared 
the first of an incomparable series of papers, contain- 
ing observations on life and literature by an imaginary 
Spectator. 

The Spectator himself was conceived and drawn 
by Addison; and it is not easy to doubt that the por- 
trait was meant to be in some features a likeness of 
the painter. The Spectator is a gentleman Avho, after 
passing a studious youth at the university, has trav- 
elled on classic ground, and has bestowed much atten- 
tion on curious points of antiquity. He has, on his 
return, fixed his residence in London, and has observed 
all the forms of life which are to be found in that great 
city, has daily listened to the wits of Will's, has smoked 
with the philosophers of the Grecian, and has mingled 
with the parsons at Child's, and with the politicians at 
the St. James's. In the morning, he often listens 
to the hum of the Exchange; in the evening, his face 
is constantly to be seen in the pit of Drury Lane Thea- 
tre. But an insurmountable bashfulness prevents him 
from opening his mouth, except in a small circle of in- 
timate friends. 



144 MACAULAY'S 

These friends were first sketched by Steele. Four 
of the club, the templar, the clergyman, the soldier, 
and the merchant, were uninteresting figures, fit only 
for a background. But the other two, an old 
country baronet and an old town rake, though not 
delineated with a very delicate pencil, had some good 
strokes. Addison took the rude outlines into his own 
hands, retouched them, colored them, and is in truth 
the creator of the Sir Roger de Coverley and the Will 
Honeycomb with whom we are all familiar. 

The plan of the Spectator must be allowed to be 
both original and eminently happy. Every valuable 
essay in the series may be read with pleasure separate- 
ly; yet the five or six hundred essays form a whole, 
and a whole which has the interest of a novel. It must 
be remembered, too, that at that time no novel giving 
a lively and powerful picture of the common life and 
manners of England had appeared. Richardson was 
working as a compositor. Fielding was robbing birds' 
nests. Smollett was not yet born. The narrative, 
therefore, which connects together the Spectator's 
essays gave to our ancestors their first taste of an 
exquisite and untried pleasure. That narrative was 
indeed constructed with no art or labor. The events 
were such events as occur every day. Sir Roger comes 
up to town to see Eugenio, as the worthy baronet 
always calls Prince Eugene, goes with the Spectator 
on the water to Spring Gardens, walks among the 
tombs in the Abbey, and is frightened by the Mo- 
hawks,^^ but conquers his apprehension so far as to 
go to the theatre when the Distressed Mother is acted. 
The Spectator pays a visit in the summer to Coverley 
Hall, is charmed with the old house, the old butler. 



ADDISON. 145 

and the old chaplain, eats a jack caught by Will Wim- 
ble, rides to the assizes, and hears a point of law dis- 
cussed by Tom Touchy. At last a letter from the 
honest butler brings to the club the news that Sir 
Eoger is dead. Will Honeycomb marries and reforms 
at sixty. The club breaks up; and the Spectator 
resigns his functions. Such events can hardly be said 
to form a plot; yet they are related with such truth, 
such grace, such wit, such humor, such pathos, such 
kno\vledge of the human heart, such knowledge of the 
ways of the world, that they charm us on the hun- 
dredth perusal. W^e have not the least doubt that 
if Addison had written a novel, on the extensive plan, 
it would have been superior to any that we possess. 
As it is, he is entitled to be considered not only as the 
greatest of the English essayists, but as the forerun- 
ner of the great English novelists. 

We say this of Addison alone; for Addison is the 
Spectator. About three sevenths of the work are his; 
and it is no exaggeration to say that his worst essay is 
as good as the best of any of his coadjutors. His best 
essays approach near to absolute perfection; nor is 
their excellence more wonderful than their variety. 
His invention never seems to flag; nor is he ever under 
the necessity of repeating himself, or of wearing out 
a subject. There are no dregs in his wine. He regales 
us after the fashion of that prodigal nabob who held 
that here was only one good glass in a bottle. As soon 
as we have tasted the first sparkling foam of a jest, 
it is withdrawn, and a fresh draught of nectar is at 
our lips. On the Monday we have an allegory as lively 
and ingenious as Lucian's Auction of Lives; on the 
Tuesday, an Eastern apologue as richly colored as the 



146 MACAULAY'S 

Tales of Scheherezade ; on the Wednesday, a character 
described with the skill of La Bruyere ; on the Thurs- 
day, a scene from common life equal to the best chap- 
ters in the Vicar of Wakefield; on the Friday, some 
sly Horatian pleasantry on fashionable follies, on 
hoops, patches, or puppet shows; and on the Saturday, 
a religious meditation, which will bear a comparison 
with the finest passages in Massillon. 

It is dangerous to select where there is so much 
that deserves the highest praise. We will venture, how- 
ever, to say that any person who wishes to form a just 
notion of the extent and variety of Addison's powers 
will do well to read at one sitting the following papers : 
the two Visits to the Abbey, the Visit to the Exchange, 
the Journal of the Retired Citizen, the Vision of 
Mirza, the Transmigrations of Pugg the Monkey, and 
the Death of Sir Roger de Coverley. 

The least valuable of Addison's contributions to 
the Spectator are, in the judgment of our age, his 
critical papers. Yet his critical papers are always 
luminous, and often ingenious. The very worst of 
them must be regarded as creditable to him, when 
the character of the school in which he had been 
trained is fairly considered. The best of them were 
much too good for his readers. In truth, he was not 
so far behind our generation as he was before his 
own. No essays in the Spectator were more censured 
and derided than those in w^hich he raised his voice 
against the contempt with which our fine old ballads 
were regarded, and showed the scoffers that the same 
gold which, burnished and polished, gives lustre to the 
^neid and the Odes of Horace, is mingled with the 
rude dross of Chevy Chase. 



ADDISON. 147 

It is not strange that the success of the Spectator 
should have been such as no similar work has ever ob- 
tained. The number of copies daily distributed was at 
first three thousand. It subsequently increased, and 
had risen to near four thousand when the stamp tax 
was imposed. That tax was fatal to a crowd of jour- 
nals. The Spectator, however, stood its ground, 
doubled its price, and, though its circulation fell off, 
still yielded a large revenue both to the state and to 
the authors. For particular papers the demand was 
immense; of some, it is said, twenty thousand copies 
were required. But this was not all. To have the 
Spectator served up every morning with the bohea and 
rolls was a luxury for the few. The majority were 
content to wait till essays enough had appeared to form 
a volume. Ten thousand copies of each volume 
were immediately taken off, and new editions were 
called for. It must be remembered that the popu- 
lation of England was then hardly a third of what it 
now is. 

The number of Englishmen who were in the habit 
of reading was probably not a sixth of what it now is. 
A shopkeeper or a farmer who found any pleasure 
in literature was a rarity. Nay, there was doubtless 
more than one knight of the shrine whose country-seat 
did not contain ten books, receipt-books and books on 
farriery included. In these circumstances, the sale 
of the Spectator must be considered as indicating a 
popularity quite as great as that of the most success- 
ful works of Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Dickens in our 
own time. 

At the close of 1712 the Spectator ceased to appear. 
It was probably felt that the short-faced gentleman 



148 MACAULAY'S 

and his club had been long enough before the town; 
and that it was time to withdraw them, and to replace 
them by a new set of characters. In a few weeks the 
first number of the Guardian was published. But the 
Guardian was unfortunate both in its birth and in its 
death. It began in dulness, and disappeared in a tem- 
pest of faction. The original plan was bad. Addison 
contributed nothing till sixty-six numbers had ap- 
peared; and it was then impossible to make the Guar- 
dian what the Spectator had been. Nestor Ironside 
and the Miss Lizards were people to whom even he 
could impart no interest. He could only furnish some 
excellent little essays, both serious and comic ; and this 
he did. 

Why Addison gave no assistance to the Guardian 
during the first two months of its existence is a ques- 
tion which has puzzled the editors and biographers, 
but which seems to us to admit of a very easy solution. 
He was then engaged in bringing his Cato on the stage. 

The first four acts of this drama had been lying in 
his desk since his return from Italy. His modest and 
sensitive nature shrank from the risk of a public and 
shameful failure ; and, though all who saw the manu- 
script were loud in praise, some thought it possible 
that an audience might become impatient even of very 
good rhetoric, and advised Addison to print the play 
without hazarding a representation. At length, after 
many fits of apprehension, the poet yielded to the 
urgency of his political friends, who hoped that the 
public would discover some analogy between the fol- 
lowers of Caesar and the Tories, between Sempronius 
and the apostate Whigs, between Cato, struggling to 
the last for the liberties of Eome, and the band of 



ADDISON. 149 

patriots who still stood firm round Halifax and 
Wharton. 

Addison gave the play to the managers of Drury 
Lane Theatre, without stipulating for any advantage 
to himself. They therefore thought themselves bound 
to spare no cost in scenery and dresses. The decora- 
tions, it is true, would not have pleased the skilful 
eye of Mr. Macready. Juba's waistcoat blazed with 
gold lace; Marcia's hoop was worthy of a duchess on 
the birthday ; and Cato wore a wig worth fifty guineas. 
The prologue was written by Pope, and is undoubtedly 
a dignified and spirited composition. The part of the 
hero was excellently played by Booth. Steele under- 
took to pack a house. The boxes were in a blaze with 
the stars of the Peers in opposition. The pit was 
crowded with attentive and friendly listeners from the 
Inns of Court and the literary coffee-houses. Sir Gil- 
bert Heathcote, Governor of the Bank of England, 
was at the head of a powerful body of auxiliaries from 
the City,^* warm men and true Whigs, but better 
known at Jonathan's and Garraway's than in the 
haunts of wits and critics. 

These precautions were quite superfluous. The 
Tories, as a body, regarded Addison with no unkind 
feelings. Nor was it for their interest, professing, as 
they did, profound reverence for law and prescription, 
and abhorrence both of popular insurrection and of 
standing armies, to appropriate to themselves reflec- 
tions thrown on the great military chief and dema- 
gogue, who, with the support of the legions and of 
the common people, subverted all the ancient institu- 
tions of his country. Accordingly, every shout that 
was raised by the members of the Kit Cat was echoed 



150 MAC AUL AY'S 

by the High Churchmen of the October; and the cur- 
tain at length fell amidst thunders of unanimous 
applause. 

The delight and admiration of the town were de- 
scribed by the Guardian in terms which we might 
attribute to partiality, were it not that the Examiner, 
the organ of the ministry, held similar language. The 
Tories, indeed, found much to sneer at in the conduct 
of their opponents. Steele had on this, as on other 
occasions, shown more zeal than taste or judgment. 
The honest citizens who marched under the orders 
of Sir Gibby, as he was facetiously called, probably 
knew better when to buy and when to sell stock than 
when to clap and when to hiss at a play, and incurred 
some ridicule by making the hypocritical Sempronius 
their favorite, and by giving to his insincere rants 
louder plaudits than they bestowed on the temperate 
eloquence of Cato. Wharton, too, who had the in- 
credible effrontery to applaud the lines about flying 
from prosperous vice and from the power of impious 
men to a private station, did not escape the sarcasms 
of those who justly thought that he could fly from 
nothing more vicious or impious than himself. The 
epilogue, which was written by Garth, a zealous Whig, 
was severely and not unreasonabh^ censured as ignoble 
and out of place. But Addison was described, even 
by the bitterest Tory writers, as a gentleman of wit 
and virtue, in whose friendship many persons of both 
parties were happy, and whose name ought not to be 
mixed up with factious squabbles. 

Of the jests by which the triumph of the Whig 
party was disturbed, the most severe and happy was 
Bolingbroke's. Between two acts, he sent for Booth 



ADDISON. 151 

to his box, and presented him, before the whole theatre, 
with a purse of fifty guineas for defending the cause 
of hberty so well against a perpetual dictator. This 
was a pungent allusion to the attempt which Marlbor- 
ough had made, not long before his fall, to obtain a 
patent creating him Captain General for life. 

It was April; and in April, a hundred and thirty 
years ago, the London season was thought to be far 
advanced. During a whole month, however, Cato was 
performed to overflowing houses, and brought into the 
treasury of the theatre twice the gains of an ordinary 
spring. In the summer the Drury Lane company went 
down to the Act at Oxford, and there, before an audi- 
ence which retained an affectionate remembrance of 
Addison's accomplishments and virtues, his tragedy 
was acted during several days. The gownsmen began 
to besiege the theatre in the forenoon, and by one in 
the afternoon all the seats were filled. 

About the merits of the piece which had so extraor- 
dinary an effect, the public, we suppose, has made up 
its mind. To compare it with the masterpieces of the 
Attic stage, with the great English dramas of the time 
of Elizabeth, or even with the productions of Schiller's 
manhood, would be absurd indeed. Yet it contains 
excellent dialogue and declamation, and, am^ong plays 
fashioned on the French model, must be allowed to 
rank high ; not, indeed, with Athalie or Saul ; but, we 
think, not below Cinna, and certainly above any other 
English tragedy of the same school, above many of 
the plays of Cornville, above many of the plays of Vol- 
taire and Alfieri, and above some plays of Eacine. Be 
this as it may, we have little doubt that Cato did as 
much as the Tatlers, Spectators, and Freeholders 



152 MACAULAY'S 

united to raise Addison's fame among his contem- 
poraries. 

The modesty and good nature of the successful 
dramatist had tamed even the malignity of faction. 
But literary envy, it should seem, is a fiercer passion 
than party spirit. It was by a zealous Whig that the 
fiercest attack on the Whig tragedy was made. John 
Dennis published Remarks on Cato, which were written 
with some acuteness, and with much coarseness and 
asperity. Addison neither defended himself nor re* 
taliated. On many points he had an excellent defence ; 
and nothing would have been easier than to retaliate ; 
for Dennis had written bad odes, bad tragedies, bad 
comedies: he had, moreover, a larger share than most 
men of those infirmities and eccentricities which excite 
laughter; and Addison's power of turning either an 
absurd book or an absurd man into ridicule was un- 
rivalled. Addison, however, serenely conscious of his 
superiority, looked with pity on his assailant, whose 
temper, naturally irritable and gloomy, had been 
soured by want, by controversy, and by literary fail- 
ures. 

But among the young candidates for Addison's 
favor there was one distinguished by talents from the 
rest, and distinguished, we fear, not less by malignity 
and insincerity. Pope was only twenty-five. But 
his powers had expanded to their full maturity; and 
his best poem, the Rape of the Lock, had recently been 
published. Of his genius, Addison had always ex- 
pressed high admiration. But Addison had early dis- 
cerned, what might indeed have been discerned by an 
eye less penetrating than his, that the diminutive, 
crooked, sickly boy was eager to revenge himself on 



ADDISON. 153 

society for the unkindness of nature. In the Spec- 
tator, the Essay on Criticism had been praised with 
cordial warmth ; but a gentle hint had been added that 
the writer of so excellent a poem would have done well 
to avoid ill-natured personalities. Pope, though evi- 
dently more galled by the censure than gratified by the 
praise, returned thanks for the admonition, and prom- 
ised to profit by it. The two writers continued to ex- 
change civilities, counsel, and small good offices. Addi- 
son publicly extolled Pope's miscellaneous pieces; and 
Pope furnished Addison with a prologue. This did 
not last long. Pope hated Dennis, whom he had in- 
jured without provocation. The appearance of the 
Eemarks on Cato gave the irritable poet an oppor- 
tunity of venting his malice under the show of friend- 
ship, and such an opportunity could not be but wel- 
come to a nature which was implacable in enmity, 
and which always preferred the tortuous to the straight 
path. He published, accordingly, the Narrative of 
the Frenzy of John Dennis. But Pope had mistaken 
his powers. He was a great master of invective and 
sarcasm. He could dissect a character in terse and 
sonorous couplets, brilliant with antithesis; but of 
dramatic talent he was altogether destitute. If he had 
written a lampoon on Dennis such as that on Atticus, 
or that on Sporus, the old grumbler would have been 
crushed. But Pope writing dialogue resembled — to 
borrow Horace's imagery and his own — a wolf, which 
instead of biting, should take to kicking, or a monkey 
which should try to sting. The Narrative is utterly 
contemptible. Of argument there is not even the 
show ; and the jests are such as, if they were introduced 
into a farce, would call forth the hisses of the shilling 



154: MACAULAY'S 

gallery. Dennis raves about the drama ; and the nurse 
thinks that he is calling for a dram. " There is," he 
cries, " no peripetia in the tragedy, no change of for- 
tune, no change at all." " Pray, good sir, be not 
angry," says the old woman; ''I'll fetch change." 
This is not exactly the pleasantry of Addison. 

There can be no doubt that Addison saw through 
this officious zeal, and felt himself deeply aggrieved by 
it. So foolish and spiteful a pamphlet could do him 
no good, and, if he were thought to have any hand 
in it, must do him harm. Gifted with incomparable 
powers of ridicule, he had never, even in self-defence, 
used those powers inhumanly or uncourteously ; and he 
was not disposed to let others make his fame and his 
interests a pretext under which they might commit 
outrages from which he had himself constantly ab- 
stained. He accordingly declared that he had no con- 
cern in the Narrative, that he disapproved of it, and 
that if he answered the Eemarks, he would answer 
them like a gentleman; and he took care to communi- 
cate this to Dennis. Pope was bitterly mortified; and 
to this transaction we are inclined to ascribe the hatred 
with which he ever after regarded Addison. 

In September, 1713, the Guardian ceased to appear. 
Steele had gone mad about politics. A general election 
had just taken place: he had been chosen member 
for Stockbridge; and he fully expected to play a first 
part in Parliament. The immense success of the 
Tatler and Spectator had turned his head. He had 
been the editor of both those papers, and was not aware 
how entirely they owed their influence and popularity 
to the genius of his friend. His spirits, always violent, 
were now excited by vanity, ambition, and faction, to 



ADDISON. 155 

such a pitch that he every day committed some offence 
against good sense and good taste. All the discreet and 
moderate members of his own party regretted and con- 
demned his folly. " I am in a thousand troubles," 
Addison wrote, " about poor Dick, and wish that his 
zeal for the public may not be ruinous to himself. But 
he has sent me word that he is determined to go on, 
and that any advice I may give him in this particular 
will have no weight with him." 

Steele set up a political paper called the English- 
man, which, as it was not supported by contributions 
from Addison, completely failed. By this work, by 
some other writings of the same kind, and by the airs 
which he gave himself at the first meeting of the new 
Parliament, he made the Tories so angry that they 
determined to expel him. The Whigs stood by him 
gallantly, but were unable to save him. The vote of 
expulsion was regarded by all dispassionate men as 
a tyrannical exercise of the power of the majority. 
But Steele's violence and folly, though they by no 
means justified the steps which his enemies took, had 
completely disgusted his friends; nor did he ever re- 
gain the place which he had held in the public esti- 
mation. 

Addison about this time conceived the design of 
adding an eighth volume to the Spectator. In June, 
1714, the first number of the new series appeared, and 
during about six months three papers were published 
weekly. Nothing can be more striking than the con- 
trast between the Englishman and the eighth volume 
of the Spectator, between Steele without Addison, and 
Addison without Steele. The Englishman is forgot- 
ten : the eighth volume of the Spectator contains, per- 
12 



156 MACAULAY'S 

haps, the finest essays, both serious and playful, in the 
English language. 

Before this volume was completed, the death of 
Anne produced an entire change in the administration 
of public affairs. The blow fell suddenly. It found 
the Tory party distracted by internal feuds, and un- 
prepared for any great effort. Harley had just been 
disgraced. Bolingbroke, it was supposed, would be 
the chief minister. But the queen was on her death- 
bed before the white staff had been given, and her 
last public act was to deliver it with a feeble hand to 
the Duke of Shrewsbury. The emergency produced 
a coalition between all sections of public men who 
were attached to the Protestant succession. George the 
First was proclaimed without Opposition. A council, 
in which the leading Whigs had seats, took the direc- 
tion of affairs till the new king should arrive. The 
first act of the lords justices was to appoint Addison 
their secretary. 

There is an idle tradition that he was directed to 
prepare a letter to the king, that he could not satisfy 
himself as to the style of this composition, and that 
the lords justices called in a clerk who at once did what 
was wanted. It is not strange that a story so flattering 
to mediocrity should be popular; and we are sorry to 
deprive dunces of their consolation. But the truth 
must be told. It was well observed by Sir James Mack- 
intosh, whose knowledge of these times was unequalled, 
that Addison never, in any official document, affected 
wit or eloquence, and that his despatches are, without 
exception, remarkable for unpretending simplicity. 
Everybody who knows with what ease Addison's finest 
essays were produced must be convinced that, if well 



ADDISON. 157 

turned phrases had been wanted, he would have had 
no difficulty in finding them. We are, however, in- 
clined to believe that the story is not absolutely with- 
out a foundation. It may well be that Addison did not 
know, till he had consulted experienced clerks who re- 
membered the times when William the Third was 
absent on the Continent, in what form a letter from 
the Council of Eegency to the king ought to be drawn. 
We think it very likely that the ablest statesmen of 
our time, Lord John Russell, Sir Eobert Peel, Lord 
Palmerston, for example, would, in similar circum- 
stances, be found quite as ignorant. Every office has 
some litle mysteries which the dullest man may learn 
with a little attention, and which the greatest man 
cannot possibly know by intuition. One paper must be 
signed by the chief of the department; another by his 
deputy; to a third the royal sign-manual is necessary. 
One communication is to be registered, and another is 
not. One sentence must be in black ink, and another 
in red ink. If the ablest Secretary for Ireland were 
moved to the India Board, if the ablest President of 
the India Board were moved to the War Office, he 
would require instruction on points like these; and 
we do not doubt that Addison required such instruc- 
tion when he became, for the first time, secretary to 
the lords justices. 

George the First took possession of his kingdom 
without opposition. A new ministry was formed, and 
a new Parliament favorable to the Whigs chosen. 
Sunderland was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland ; 
and Addison again went to Dublin as Chief Secretary. 

At Dublin Swift resided; and there was much 
speculation about the way in which the dean and the 



158 MACAULAY'S 

secretary would behave towards each other. The re- 
lations which existed between these remarkable men 
form an interesting and pleasing portion of literary- 
history. They had early attached themselves to the 
same political party and to the same patrons. While 
Anne's Whig ministry was in power, the visits of Swift 
to London and the official residence of Addison in 
Ireland had given them opportunities of knowing each 
other. They were the two shrewdest observers of their 
age. But their observations on each other had led 
them to favorable conclusions. Swift did full justice 
to the rare powers of conversation which were latent 
under the bashful deportment of Addison. Addison, 
on the other hand, discerned much good-nature under 
the severe look and manner of Swift ; and, indeed, the 
Swift of 1708 and the Swift of 1738 were two very 
different men. 

But the paths of the two friends diverged widely. 
The Whig statesmen loaded Addison with solid bene- 
fits. They praised Swift, asked him to dinner, and 
did nothing more for him. His profession laid them 
under a difficulty. In the State they could not pro- 
mote him; and they had reason to fear that, by be- 
stowing preferment in the Church on the author of 
the Tale of a Tub, they might give scandal to the 
public, which had no high opinion of their orthodoxy. 
He did not make fair allowance for the difficulties 
which prevented Halifax and Somers from serving 
him, thought himself an ill-used man, sacrificed honor 
and consistency to revenge, joined the Tories, and be- 
came their most formidable champion. He soon found, 
however, that his old friends were less to blame than 
he had supposed. The dislike with which the queen 



ADDISON. 159 

and the heads of the Church regarded him was insur- 
mountable ; and it was with the greatest difficulty that 
he obtained an ecclesiastical dignity of no great value, 
on condition of fixing his residence in a country which 
he detested. 

Difference of poltical opinion had produced, not in- 
deed a quarrel, but a coolness between Swift and Addi- 
son. They at length ceased altogether to see each 
other. Yet there was between them a tacit compact 
like that between the hereditary guests in the Iliad. 

**'''Eyx€a 8' aXXffK(ov aKccajifda kcli bi ofilXov ' 
UoWoi fiiv yap €fioi Tpcoes *cXetToi t eTTiKovpoi, 
KreiVetj/, 6v K€ 3e6s ye iropij koL ttoo-o-l Ki;^etci), 
IloXXot d'av aoi 'A;(atot, epaipefiep, op K€ dvpqai" ^' 

It is not strange that Addison, who calumniated 
and insulted nobody, should not have calumniated or 
insulted Swift. Bat it is remarkable that Swift, to 
whom neither genius nor virtue was sacred, and who 
generally seemed to find, like most other renegades, a 
peculiar pleasure in attacking old friends, should have 
shown so much respect and tenderness to Addison. 

Fortune had now changed. The accession of the 
house of Hanover had secured in England the liberties 
of the people, and in Ireland the dominion of the 
Protestant caste. To that caste Swift was more odious 
than any other man. He was hooted and even pelted 
in the streets of Dublin ; and could not venture to ride 
along the strand for his health without the attendance 
of armed servants. Many whom he had formerly 
served now libelled and insulted him. At this time 
Addison arrived. He had been advised not to show 
the smallest civilitv to the Dean of St. Patrick's. He 



160 MACAULAY'S 

had answered, with admirable spirit, that it might be 
necessary for men whose fidelity to their party was sus- 
pected to hold no intercourse with political opponents ; 
but that one who had been a steady Whig in the worst 
times might venture, when the good cause was trium- 
phant, to shake hands with an old friend who was 
one of the vanquished Tories. His kindness was sooth- 
ing to the proud and cruelly wounded spirit of Swift; 
and the two great satirists resumed their habits of 
friendly intercourse. 

Those associates of Addison whose political opin- 
ions agreed with his shared his good fortune. He 
took Tickell with him to Ireland. He procured for 
Budgell a lucrative place in the same kingdom. Am- 
brose Philips was provided for in England. Steele 
had injured himself so much by his eccentricity and 
perverseness that he obtained but a very small part of 
what he thought his due. He was, however, knighted ; 
he had a place in the household; and he subsequently 
received other marks of favor from the court. 

Addison did not remain long in Ireland. In 1715 
he quitted his secretaryship for a seat at the Board of 
Trade. In the same year his comedy of the Drummer 
was brought on the stage. The name of the author 
was not announced; the piece was coldly received; 
and some critics have expressed a doubt whether it 
were really Addison's. To us the evidence, both ex- 
ternal and internal, seems decisive. It is not in Ad- 
dison's best manner; but it contains numerous pas- 
sages which no other writer known to .us could have 
produced. It was again performed after Addison's 
death, and, being known to be his, was loudly ap- 
plauded. 



ADDISON. 161 

Toward the close of the year 1715, while the rebel- 
lion was still raging in Scotland, Addison published 
the first number of a paper called the Freeholder. 
Among his political works the Freeholder is entitled to 
the first place. Even in the Spectator there are few 
serious papers nobler than the character of his friend 
Lord Somers, and certainly no satirical papers su- 
perior to those in which the Tory fox-hunter is intro- 
duced. This character is the original of Squire West- 
ern, and is drawn with all Fielding's force, and with a 
delicacy of which Fielding was altogether destitute. 
As none of Addison's works exhibits stronger marks 
of his genius that the Freeholder, so none does more 
honor to his moral character. It is difficult to extol 
too highly the candor and humanity of a political 
writer whom even the excitement of civil war cannot 
hurry into unseemly violence. Oxford, it is well 
known, was then the stronghold of Toryism. The 
High Street had been repeatedly lined with baj^onets 
in order to keep down the disaffected gownsmen; and 
traitors pursued by the messengers of the Govern- 
ment had been concealed in the garrets of several col- 
leges. Yet the admonition which, even under such 
circumstances, Addison addressed to the University 
is singularly gentle, respectful, and even affectionate. 
Indeed, he could not find it in his heart to deal harshly 
even with imaginary persons. His fox-hunter, though 
ignorant, stupid, and violent, is at heart a good fellow, 
and is at last reclaimed by the clemency of the king. 
Steele was dissatisfied with his friend's moderation, 
and, though he aclmowledged that the Freeholder was 
excellently written, complained that the ministry 
played on a lute when it was necessary to blow the 



1G2 MACAULAY'S 

trumpet. He accordingly determined to execute a 
flourish after his own fashion, and tried to rouse 
the public spirit of the nation by means of a paper 
called the Town Talk, which is now as utterly for- 
gotten as his Englishman, as his Crisis, as his 
Letter to the Bailiff of Stockbridge, as his Eeader; in 
short, as everything he wrote without the help of 
Addison. 

In the same year in which the Drummer was acted, 
and in which the first numbers of the Freeholder ap- 
peared, the estrangement of Pope and Addison became 
complete. Addison had from the first seen that Pope 
was false and malevolent. Pope had discovered that 
Addison was jealous. The discovery was made in a 
strange manner. Pope had written the Rape of the 
Lock, in two cantos, without supernatural machinery. 
These two cantos had been loudly applauded, and by 
none more loudly than by Addison. Then Pope 
thought of the Sylphs and Gnomes, Ariel, Momentilla, 
Crispissa, and Umbriel, and resolved to interweave the 
Rosicrucian mythology with the original fabric. He 
asked Addison's advice. Addison said that the poem 
as it stood was a delicious little thing, and entreated 
Pope not to run the risk of marring what was so excel- 
lent in trying to mend it. Pope afterward declared 
that this insidious counsel first opened his eyes to the 
baseness of him who gave it. 

Now there can be no doubt that Pope's plan was 
most ingenious, and that he afterward executed it with 
great skill and success. But does it necessarily follow 
that Addison's advice was bad? And if Addison's ad- 
vice w^as bad, does it necessarily follow that it was 
given from bad motives? If a friend were to ask us 



ADDISON. 163 

whether we would advise him to risk his all in a lottery 
of which the chances were ten to one against him, we 
should do our best to dissuade him from running such 
a risk. Even if he were so lucky as to get the thirty 
thousand pound prize, we should not admit that we 
had counselled him ill; and we should certainly think 
it the height of injustice in him to accuse us of having 
been actuated by malice. We think Addison's advice 
good advice. It rested on a sound principle, the result 
of long and wide experience. The general rule un- 
doubtedly is that, when a successful work of imagina- 
tion has been produced, it should not be recast. We 
cannot at this moment call to mind a single instance 
in which this rule has been transgressed with happy 
effect, except the instance of the Eape of the Lock. 
Tasso recast his Jerusalem. Akenside recast his 
Pleasures of the Imagination, and his Epistle to Curio. 
Pope himself, emboldened no doubt by the success with 
which he had expanded and remodelled the Eape of the 
Lock, made the same experiment on the Dunciad. All 
these attempts failed. Who was to foresee that Pope 
would, once in his life, be able to do what he could 
not himself do twice, and what nobody else had ever 
done? 

Addison's advice was good. But had it been bad, 
why should we pronounce it dishonest? Scott tells us 
that one of his best friends predicted the failure of 
Waverley. Herder adjured Goethe not to take so un- 
promising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade 
Eobertson from writing the History of Charles the 
Fifth. Nay, Pope himself was one of those who 
prophesied that Cato would never succeed on the stage, 
and advised Addison to print it without risking a rep- 



164 MACAULAY'S 

resentation. But Scott, Goethe, Robertson, Addison, 
had the good sense and generosity to give their advisers 
credit for the best intentions. Pope's heart was not of 
the same kind with theirs. 

In 1715, while he was engaged in translating the 
Iliad, he met Addison at a coffee house. Phillipps and 
Budgell were there; but their sovereign got rid of 
them, and asked Pope to dine with him alone. After 
dinner, Addison said that he lay under a difficulty 
which he wished to explain. " Tickell,'' he said, 
" translated, some time ago, the first book of the Iliad. 
I have promised to look it over and correct it. I can- 
not, therefore, ask to see yours, for that would be 
double dealing." Pope made a civil reply, and begged 
that his second book might have the advantage of Ad- 
dison's revision. Addison readily agreed, looked over 
the second book, and sent it back with warm com- 
mendations. 

TickelFs version of the first book appeared soon 
after this conversation. In the preface, all rivalry was 
earnestly disclaimed. Tickell declared that he should 
not go on with the Iliad. That enterprise he should 
leave to powers which he admitted to be superior to 
his own. His only view, he said, in publishing this 
specimen was to bespeak the favor of the public to a 
translation of the Odyssey, in which he had made some 
progress. 

Addison, and Addison's devoted followers, pro- 
nounced both the versions good, but maintained that 
Tickell's had more of the original. The town gave a 
decided preference to Pope's. We do not think it 
worth while to settle such a question of precedence. 
T^either of the rivals can be said to have translated 



ADDISON. 165 

the Iliad, unless, indeed, the word translation be used 
in the sense which it bears in the Midsummer Night's 
Dream. When Bottom makes his appearance with 
an ass's head instead of his own, Peter Quince ex- 
claims, " Blegs thee! Bottom, bless thee! thou 
art translated." In this sense, undoubtedly, the 
readers of either Pope or Tickell may very properly 
exclaim, " Bless thee. Homer! thou art translated in- 
deed." 

Our readers will, we hope, agree with us in think- 
ing that no man in Addison's situation could have 
acted more fairly and kindly, both towards Pope and 
towards Tickell, than he appears to have done. But 
an odious suspicion had sprung up in the mind of 
Pope. He fancied, and he soon firmly believed, that 
there was a deep conspiracy against his fame and his 
fortunes. The work on which he had staked his repu- 
tation was to be depreciated. The subscription, on 
which rested his hopes of a competence, was to be de- 
feated. With this view Addison had made a rival 
translation : Tickell had consented to father it : and 
the wits of Button's had united to puff it. 

Is there any external evidence to support this grave 
accusation ? The answer is short. There is absolutely 
none. 

Was there any internal evidence which proved Ad- 
dison to be the author of this version ? Was it a work 
which Tickell was incapable of producing? Surely 
not. Tickell was a fellow of a college at Oxford, and 
must be supposed to have been able to construe the 
Iliad; and he was a better versifier than his friend. 
We are not aware that Pope pretended to have discov- 
ered any turns of expression peculiar to Addison. Had 



166 MAC AUL AY'S 

such turns of expression been discovered, they would 
be sufficiently accounted for by supposing Addison to 
have corrected his friend's lines, as he owned that he 
had done. • 

Is there anything in the character of the accused 
persons which makes the accusation probable? We 
answer confidently — nothing. Tickell was long after 
this time described by Pope himself as a very fair and 
worthy man. Addison had been, during many years, 
before the public. Literary rivals, political opponents, 
had kept their eyes on him. But neither envy nor fac- 
tion, in their utmost rage, had ever imputed to him a 
single deviation from the laws of honor and of social 
morality. Had he been indeed a man meanly jealous 
of fame, and capable of stooping to base and wicked 
arts for the purpose of injuring his competitors, would 
his vices have remained latent so long? He was a 
writer of tragedy : had he ever injured Eowe ? He was 
a writer of comedy: had he not done ample justice to 
Congreve, and given valuable help to Steele? He was 
a pamphleteer: have not his good-nature and gener- 
osity been acknowledged by Swift, his rival in fame 
and his adversary in politics ? 

That Tickell should have been guilty of a villany 
seems to us highly improbable. That Addison should 
have been guilty of a villany seems to us highly im- 
probable. But that these two men should have con- 
spired together to commit a villany seems to us im- 
probable in a tenfold degree. All that is known to us 
of their intercourse tends to prove that it was not the 
intercourse of two accomplices in crime. These are 
some of the lines in which Tickell poured forth his 
sorrow over the coffin of Addison : 



ADDISON. leY 

" Or dost thou warn poor mortals left behind, 
A task well suited to thy gentle mind? 
Oh, if sometimes thy spotless form descend. 
To me thine aid, thou guardian genius, lend. 
When rage misguides me, or when fear alarms, 
When pain distresses, or when pleasure charms, 
In silent whisperings purer thoughts impart, 
And turn from ill a frail and feeble heart; 
Lead through the paths thy virtue trod before. 
Till bliss shall join, nor death can part us more." 

In what words, we should like to know, did this 
guardian genius invite his pupil to join in a plan such 
as the editor of the Satirist would hardly dare to pro- 
pose to the editor of the Age ? 

We do not accuse Pope of bringing an accusation 
which he knew to be false. We have not the smallest 
doubt that he believed it to be true; and the evidence 
on which he believed it he found in his own bad heart. 
His own life was one long series of tricks, as mean and 
as malicious as that of which he suspected Addison and 
Tickell. He was all stiletto and mask. To injure, to 
insult, and to save himself from the consequences of 
injury and insult by lying and equivocating, was the 
habit of his life. He published a lampoon on the 
Duke of Chandos; he was taxed with it, and he lied 
and equivocarted. He published a lampoon on Aaron 
Hill; he was taxed with it, and he lied and equivo- 
cated. He published a still fouler lampoon on Lady 
Mary Wortley Montague; he was taxed with it, and 
he lied with more than usual effrontery and vehemence. 
He puffed himself, and abused his enemies under 
feigned names. He robbed himself of his own letters, 
and then raised the hue and cry after them. Besides 
his frauds of malignity, of fear, of interest, and of 



168 MACAULAY'S 

vanity, there were frauds which he seems to have com- 
mitted from love of fraud aloae. He had a habit of 
stratagem, a pleasure in outwitting all who came near 
him. Whatever his object might be, the indirect road 
to it was that which he preferred. For Bolingbroke 
Pope undoubtedly felt as much love and veneration 
as it was in his nature to feel for any human being. 
Yet Pope was scarcely dead when it was discovered 
that, from no motive except the mere love of artifice, 
he had been guilty of an act of gross perfidy to Boling- 
broke. 

Nothing was more natural than that such a man 
as this should attribute to others that which he felt 
within himself. A plain, probable, coherent explana- 
tion is frankly given to him. He is certain that it is 
all a romance. A line of conduct scrupulously fair, 
and even friendly, is pursued toward him. He is con- 
vinced that it is merely a cover for a vile intrigue by 
which he is to be disgraced and ruined. It is vain to 
ask him for proofs. He has none, and wants none, 
except those which he carries in his own bosom. 

Whether Pope's malignity at length provoked Addi- 
son to retaliate for the first and last time, cannot now 
be known with certainty. We have only Pope's story, 
which runs thus. A pamphlet appeared containing 
some reflections which stung Pope to the quick. What 
those reflections were, and whether they were reflec- 
tions of which he had a right to complain, we have 
now no means of deciding. The Earl of Warwick, 
a foolish and vicious lad, who regarded Addison with 
the feelings Avith which such lads generally regard their 
best friends, told Pope, truly or falsely, that this pam- 
phlet had been written by Addison's direction. When 



ADDISON. 169 

we consider what a tendency stories have to grow, in 
passing even from one honest man to another honest 
man, and when we consider that to the name of honest 
man neither Pope nor the Earl of Warwick had a 
claim, we are not disposed to attach much importance 
to this anecdote. 

It is certain, however, that Pope was furious. He 
had already sketched the character of Atticus in prose. 
In his anger he turned this prose into the brilliant 
and energetic lines which everybody knows by heart,^® 
or ought to know by heart, and sent them to Addison. 
One charge which Pope has enforced with great skill 
is probably not without foundation. Addison was, we 
are inclined to believe, too fond of presiding over a 
circle of humble friends. Of the other imputations 
which these famous lines are intended to convey, 
scarcely one has ever been proved to be just, and some 
are certainly false. That Addison was not in the 
habit of " damning with faint praise " appears from 
innumerable passages in his writings, and from none 
more than from those in which he mentions Pope. 
And it is not merely unjust, but ridiculous, to describe 
a man who made the fortune of almost every one of 
his intimate friends, as " so obliging that he ne'er 
obliged." 

That Addison felt the sting of Pope's satire keenly, 
we cannot doubt. That he was conscious of one of the 
weaknesses with which he was reproached, is highly 
probable. But his heart, we firmly believe, acquitted 
him of the gravest part of the accusation. He acted 
like himself. As a satirist, he was, at his own weapons, 
more than Pope's match; and he would have been at 
no loss for topics. A distorted and diseased body, 



170 MACAULAY'S 

tenanted by a yet more distorted and diseased mind; 
spite and envy thinly disguised by sentiments as be- 
nevolent and noble as those which Sir Peter Teazle 
admired in Mr. Joseph Surface; a feeble, sickly licen- 
tiousness ; an odious love of filthy and noisome images ; 
these were things which a genius less powerful than 
that to which we owe the Spectator could easily have 
held up to the mirth and hatred of mankind. Addi- 
son hadj moreover, at his command other means of 
vengeance which a bad man would not have scrupled 
to use. He was powerful in the State. Pope was a 
Catholic; and, in those times, a minister would have 
found it easy to harass the most innocent Catholic by 
innumerable petty vexations. Pope, near twenty years 
later, said that " through the lenity of the Government 
alone he could live with comfort.'^ " Consider,'^ he 
exclaimed, " the injury that a man of high rank and 
credit may do to a private person, under penal laws and 
many other disadvantages." It is pleasing to reflect 
that the only revenge which Addison took was to in- 
sert in the Freeholder a warm encomium on the trans- 
lation of the Iliad, and to exhort all lovers of learning 
to put down their names as subscribers. There could 
be no doubt, he said, from the specimens already pub- 
lished, that the masterly hand of Pope would do as 
much for Homer as Dryden had done for Yirgil. 
From that time to the end of his life, he always treated 
Pope, by Pope's own acknowledgment, with justice. 
Friendship was, of course, at an end. 

One reason which induced the Earl of Warwick to 
play the ignominious part of tale-bearer on this occa- 
sion, may have been his dislike of the marriage which 
was about to take place between his mother and 



ADDISON. 171 

Addison. The Countess Dowager, a daughter of the 
old and honorable family of the Myddletons of Chirk, 
a family which, in any country but ours, would be 
called noble, resided at Holland House. Addison had, 
during some years, occupied at Chelsea a small dwell- 
ing, once the abode of Nell Gwynn. Chelsea is now a 
district of London, and Holland House may be called 
a town residence. But, in the days of Anne and George 
the First, milkmaids and sportsmen wandered between 
green hedges and over fields bright with daisies, from 
Kensington almost to the shore of the Thames. Addi- 
son and Lady Warwick were country neighbors, and 
became intimate friends. The great wit and scholar 
tried to allure the young lord from the fashionable 
amusements of beating watchmen, breaking windows, 
and rolling women in hogsheads down Holborn Hill, 
to the study of letters and the practice of virtue. 
These well meant exertions did little good, however, 
either to the disciple or to the master. Lord Warwick 
grew up a rake ; and Addison fell in love. The mature 
beauty of the countess has been celebrated by poets in 
language which, after a very large allowance has been 
made for flattery, would lead us to believe that she 
was a fine woman; and her rank doubtless heightened 
her attractions. The courtship was long. The hopes 
of the lover appear to have risen and fallen with the 
fortunes of his party. His attachment Avas at length 
matter of such notoriety that, when he visited Ireland 
for the last time, Rowe addressed some consolatory 
verses to the Chloe of Holland House. It strikes us as 
a little strange that, in these verses, Addison should 
be called Lycidas, a name of singularly evil omen for 
a swain just about to cross St. George's Channel. 

18 



1Y2 MACAULAY'S 

At length Chloe capitulated. Addison was indeed 
able to treat with her on equal terms. He had reason 
to expect preferment even higher than that which he 
had attained. He had inherited the fortune of a 
brother who died Governor of Madras. He had pur- 
chased an estate in Warwickshire, and had been wel- 
comed to his domain in very tolerable verse by one of 
the neighboring squires, the poetical fox-hunter, Wil- 
liam Somerville. In August, 1716, the newspapers an- 
nounced that Joseph Addison, Esquire, famous for 
many excellent works both in verse and prose, had 
espoused the Countess Dowager of Warwick. 

He now fixed his abode at Holland House, a house 
which can boast of a greater number of inmates dis- 
tinguished in political and literary history than any 
other private dwelling in England. His portrait still 
hangs there. The features are pleasing ; the complexion 
is remarkably fair; but, in the expression, we trace 
rather the gentleness of his disposition than the force 
and keenness of his intellect. 

Xot long after his marriage he reached the height 
of civil greatness. The Whig Government had, dur- 
ing some time, been torn by internal dissensions. Lord 
Townshend led one section of the cabinet, Lord Sun- 
derland the other. At length, in the spring of 1717, 
Sunderland triumphed Townshend retired from office, 
and was accompanied by Walpole and Cowper. Sun- 
derland proceeded to reconstruct the ministry, and 
Addison was appointed Secretary of State. It is cer- 
tain that the Seals were pressed upon him, and were 
at first declined by him. Men equally versed in official 
business might easily have been found; and his col- 
leagues knew that they could not expect assistance from 



ADDISON. 173 

him in debate. He owed his elevation to his popu- 
larity, to his stainless probity, and to his literary fame. 

But scarcely had Addison entered the cabinet when 
his health began to fail. From one serious attack he 
recovered in the autumn; and his recovery was cele- 
brated in Latin verses, worthy of his own pen, by Vin- 
cent Bourne, who was then at Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge. A relapse soon took place ; and, in the follow- 
ing spring, Addison was prevented by a severe asthma 
from discharging the duties of his post. He resigned 
it, and was succeeded by his friend Craggs, a young 
man whose natural parts, though little improved by 
cultivation, were quick and showy, whose graceful per- 
son and winning manners had made him generally 
acceptable in society, and who, if he had lived, would 
probably have been the most formidable of all the 
rivals of Walpole. 

As yet there was no Joseph Hume. The ministers, 
therefore, were able to bestow on Addison a retiring 
pension of fifteen hundred pounds a year. In what 
form this pension was given we are not told by the 
biographers, and have not time to inquire. But it is 
certain that Addison did not vacate his seat in the 
House of Commons. 

Eest of mind and body seemed to have re-estab- 
lished his health; and he thanked God, with cheerful 
piety, for having set him free both from his office and 
from his asthma. Many years seemed to be before 
him, and he meditated many works, a tragedy on the 
death of Socrates, a translation of the Psalms, a 
treatise on the evidences of Christianity. Of this last 
performance, a part, which we could well spare, has 
come down to us. 



174 MACAULAY'S 

But the fatal complaint soon returned, and gradu- 
ally prevailed against all the resources of medicine. It 
is melancholy to think that the last months of such a 
life should have been overclouded both by domestic 
and by political vexations. A tradition which began 
early, which has been generally received, and to which 
we have nothing to oppose, has represented his wife 
as an arrogant and imperious woman. It is said that, 
till his health failed him, he was glad to escape from 
the Countess Dowager and her magnificent dining- 
room, blazing with the gilded devices of the House of 
Rich, to some tavern where he could enjoy a laugh, 
a talk about Virgil and Boileau, and a bottle of claret, 
with the friends of his happier days. All those friends, 
however, were not left to him. Sir Eichard Steele had 
been gradually estranged by various causes. He con- 
sidered himself as one who, in evil times, had braved 
martyrdom for his political principles, and demanded, 
when the Whig party was triumphant, a large com- 
pensation for what he had suffered when it was mili- 
tant. The Whig leaders took a very different view of 
his claims. They thought that he had. by his own 
petulance and folly, brought them as well as himself 
into trouble, and, though they did not absolutely neg- 
lect him, doled out favors to him with a sparing hand. 
It was natural that he should be angry with them, and 
especially angry with Addison. But what above all 
seems to have disturbed Sir Richard was the elevation 
of Tickell, who, at thirty, was made by Addison Under- 
secretary of State; while the editor of the Tatler and 
Spectator, the author of the Crisis, the member for 
Stockbridge who had been prosecuted for firm adher- 
ence to the House of Hanover, was, at near fifty, forced. 



ADDISON. 1Y5 

after many solicitations and complaints, to content 
himself with a share in the patent of Drury Lane 
Theatre. Steele himself says, in his celebrated letter 
to Congreve, that Addison, by his preference of Tickell, 
" incurred the warmest resentment of other gentle- 
men" ; and everything seems to indicate that, of 
those resentful gentlemen, Steele was himself one. 

While poor Sir Richard was brooding over what 
he considered as Addison's unkindness, a new cause 
of quarrel arose. The Whig party, already divided 
against itself, was rent by a new schism. The cele- 
brated bill for limiting the number of peers had been 
brought in. The proud Duke of Somerset, first in 
rank of all the nobles whose religion permitted them 
to sit in Parliament, was the ostensible author of the 
measure. But it was supported, and, in truths- devised 
by the Prime Minister. 

We are satisfied that the bill was most pernicious; 
and we fear that the motives which induced Sunder- 
land to frame it were not honorable to him. But we 
cannot deny that it was supported by many of the 
best and wisest men of that age. Nor was this strange. 
The royal prerogative had, within the memory of the 
generation then in the vigor of life, been so grossly 
abused, that it was still regarded with a jealousy 
which, when the peculiar situation of the house of 
Brunswick is considered, may perhaps be called im- 
moderate. The particular prerogative of creating peers 
had, in the opinion of the Whigs, been grossly 
abused by Queen Anne's last ministry; and even the 
Tories admitted that her Majesty, in swamping, as it 
has since been called, the Upper House, had done what 
only an extreme case could justify. The theory of the 



176 MACAULAY'S 

English constitution, according to many high authori- 
ties, was that three independent powers — the sover- 
eign, the nobility, and the commons — ought constantly 
to act as checks on each other. If this theory were 
sound, it seemed to follow that to put one of these 
powers under the absolute control of the other two 
was absurd. But if the number of peers were unlim- 
ited, it could not well be denied that the Upper House 
was under the absolute control of the Crown and the 
Commons, and was indebted only to their moderation 
for any power which it might be suffered to retain. 

Steele took part with the opposition, Addison with 
the ministers. Steele, in a paper called the Plebeian, 
vehemently attacked the bill. Sunderland called for 
help on Addison, and Addison obeyed the call. In a 
paper called the Old Whig, he answered, and indeed 
refuted, Steele's arguments. It seems to us that the 
premises of both the controversialists were unsound, 
that, on those premises, Addison reasoned well and 
Steele ill, and that consequently Addison brought out 
a false conclusion while Steele blundered upon the 
truth. In style, in wit, and in politeness, Addison 
maintained his superiority, though the Old Whig is 
by no means one of his happiest performances. 

At first both the anonymous opponents observed the 
laws of propriety. But at length Steele so far forgot 
himself as to throw an odious imputation on the 
morals of the chiefs of the administration. Addi- 
son replied with severity, but, in our opinion, with less 
severity than was due to so grave an offence against 
morality and decorum ; nor did he, in his just anger, 
forget for a moment the laws of good taste and good 
breeding. One calumny which has been often repeated. 



ADDISON. 177 

and never yet contradicted, it is our duty to expose. 
It is asserted in the Biographia Britannica that Addi- 
son designated Steele as " little Dicky." This asser- 
tion was repeated by Johnson, who had never seen the 
Old Whig, and was therefore excusable. It has also 
been repeated by Miss Aikin, who has seen the Old 
Whig, and for whom therefore there is less excuse. 
Now, it is true that the words " little Dicky " occur 
in the Old Whig, and that Steele's name was Richard. 
It is equally true that the words " little Isaac " occur 
in the Duenna, and that Newton's name was Isaac. 
But we confidently affirm that Addison's little Dicky 
had no more to do with Steele than Sheridan's little 
Isaac with Newton. If we apply the words " little 
Dicky" to Steele, we deprive a very lively and in- 
genious passage, not only of all its wit, but of all its 
meaning. Little Dick}^ was the nickname of Henry 
Norris, an actor of remarkably small stature, but of 
great humor, who played the usurer Gomez, then a 
"most popular part, in Dryden's Spanish Friar.^^ 

The merited reproof which Steele had received, 
though softened by some kind and courteous expres- 
sions, galled him bitterly. He replied with little force 
and great acrimony ; but no rejoinder appeared. Addi- 
son was fast hastening to his grave ; and had, we may 
well suppose, little disposition to prosecute a quarrel 
with an old friend. His complaint had terminated 
in dropsy. He bore up long and manfully. But at 
length he abandoned all hope, dismissed his physi- 
cians, and calmly prepared himself to die. 

His works he intrusted to the care of Tickell, and 
dedicated them a very few days before his death to 
Craggs, in a letter written with the sweet and grace- 



178 MACAULAY'S 

ful eloquence of a Saturday's Spectator. In this, his 
last composition, he alluded to his approaching end in 
words so manly, so cheerful, and so tender, that it is 
difficult to read them without tears. At the same time 
he earnestly recominended the interests of Tickell to 
the care of Craggs. 

Within a few hours of the time at which this dedi- 
cation was written, Addison sent to beg Gay, who was 
then living by his wits about town, to come to Holland 
House. Gay went, and was received with great kind- 
ness. To his amazement his forgiveness was implored 
by the dying man. Poor Gay, the most good-natured 
and simple of mankind, could not imagine what he 
had to forgive. There was, however, some wrong, the 
remembrance of which weighed on Addison's mind, 
and which he declared himself anxious to repair. He 
was in a state of extreme exhaustion; and the parting 
was doubtless a friendly one on both sides. Gay sup- 
posed that some plan to serve him had been in agita- 
tion at court, and had been frustrated by Addison's 
influence. Nor is this improbable. Gay had paid 
assiduous court to the royal family. But in the queen's 
days he had been the eulogist of Bolingbroke, and was 
still connected with many Tories. It is not strange 
that Addison, while heated by conflict, should have 
thought himself justified in obstructing the prefer- 
ment of one whom he might regard as a political 
enemy. Neither is it strange that, when reviewing 
his whole life, and earnestly scrutinizing all his mo- 
tives, he should think that he had acted an unkind and 
ungenerous part, in using his power against a dis- 
tressed man of letters, who was as harmless and as 
helpless as a child. 



ADDISON. 179 

One inference may be drawn from this anecdote. 
It appears that Addison, on his death-bed, called him- 
self to a strict account, and was not at ease till he had 
asked pardon for an injury which it was not even 
suspected that he had committed, for an injury which 
would have caused disquiet only to a very tender con- 
science. Is it not, then, reasonable to infer that, if he 
had really been guilty of forming a base conspiracy 
against the fame and fortunes of a rival, he would 
have expressed some remorse for so serious a crime? 
But it is unnecessary to multiply arguments and evi- 
dence for the defence, when there is neither argument 
nor evidence for the accusation. 

The last moments of Addison were perfectly serene. 
His interview with his step-son is universally known. 
^' See,^^ he said, " how a Christian can die.^^ The piety 
of Addison was, in truth, of a singularly cheerful char- 
acter. The feeling which predominates in all his de- 
votional writings is gratitude. God was to him the 
all-wise and all-powerful friend who had watched over 
his cradle with more than maternal tenderness; who 
had listened to his cries before they could form them- 
selves in prayer ; who had preserved his youth from the 
snares of vice; who had made his cup run over with 
worldly blessings; who had doubled the value of those 
blessings, by bestowing a thankful heart to enjoy them, 
and dear friends to partake them; who had rebuked 
the waves of tlie Ligurian Gulf, had purified the au- 
tumnal air of the Campagna, and had restrained the 
avalanches of Mont Cenis. Of the Psalms, his favorite 
was that which represents the Euler of all things under 
the endearing image of a shepherd, whose crook guides 
the flock safe, through gloomy and desolate glens, to 



180 MACAULAY'S 

meadows well watered and rich with herbage. On that 
goodness to which he ascribed all the happiness of his 
life, he relied in the hour of death with the love which 
casteth out fear. He died on the 17th of June, 1719. 
He had just entered on his forty-eighth year. 

His body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, 
and was borne thence to the Abbey at dead of night. 
The choir sang a -funeral hymn. Bishop Atterbury, 
one of those Tories who had loved and honored the 
most accomplished of the Whigs, met the corpse, and 
led the procession by torchlight round the shrine of 
Saint Edward and the graves of the Plantagenets, to 
the Chapel of Henry the Seventh. On the north side 
of that chapel, in the vault of the House of Albemarle, 
the coffin of Addison lies next to the coffin of Monta- 
gue. Yet a few months, and the same mourners passed 
again along the same aisle. The same sad anthem was 
again chanted. The same vault was again opened, and 
the coffin of Craggs was placed close to the coffin of 
Addison. 

Many tributes were paid to the memory of Addi- 
son; but one alone is noAV remembered. Tickell be- 
wailed his friend in an elegy which would do honor 
to the greatest name in our literature, and which 
unites the energy and magnificence of Dryden to the 
tenderness and purity of Cowper. This fine poem was 
prefixed to a superb edition of Addison's works, which 
was published, in 1721, by subscription. The names 
of the subscribers proved how widely his fame had been 
spread. That his countrymen should be eager to pos- 
sess his writings, even in a costly form, is not wonder- 
ful. But it is wonderful that, though English litera- 
ture was then little studied on the Continent, Spanish 



ADDISON. 181 

grandees, Italian prelates, marshals of France, should 
be found in the list. Among the most remarkable 
names are those of the Queen of Sweden, of Prince 
Eugene, of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the Dukes 
of Parma, Modena, and Guastalla, of the Doge of 
Genoa, of the Kegent Orleans, and of Cardinal Dubois. 
We ought to add that this edition, though eminently 
beautiful, is in some important points defective; nor, 
indeed, do we yet possess a complete collection of 
Addison's writings. 

It is strange that neither his opulent and noble 
widow, nor any of his powerful and attached friends, 
should have thought of placing even a simple tablet, 
inscribed with his name, on the walls of the Abbey. 
It was not till three generations had laughed and wept 
over the pages that the omission was supplied by the 
public veneration. At length, in our own time, his 
image, skilfully graven, appeared in Poet's Corner. 
It represents him, as we can conceive him, clad in his 
dressing-gown, and freed from his wig, stepping from 
his parlor at Chelsea into his trim little garden, with 
the account of the Everlasting Club, or the Loves of 
Hilpa and Shalum, just finished for the next day's 
Spectator, in his hand. Such a mark of national 
respect was due to the unsullied statesman, to the 
accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English 
eloquence, to the consummate painter of life and man- 
ners. It was due, above all, to the great satirist, who 
alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it; 
who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social 
reform; and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a 
long and disastrous separation, during which wit had 
been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism.. 



182 MACAULAY'S 



•NOTES. 

^ The essay on Addison first appeared in the Edinburgh 
Review for July, 1843. 

^ Laputa is a fabled island visited by Gulliver in his Trav- 
els. The inhabitants were so given over to study that a man 
of rank was attended by a flapper who carried a distended 
bladder, attached to a long handle, with which he roused his 
master from a brown study, or warned him when likely to 
walk over a precipice or into other danger. 

^ Under date of April 19th, Macaulay had written Napier, 
then editor: " Deak Napier — You may count on an article 
from me on Miss Aikin's Life of Addison. Longman sent me 
the sheets as they were printed. I own that I am greatly disap- 
pointed. . . . Miss Aikin's narrative is dull, shallow, and in- 
accurate. ... I pointed the grossest blunders out to Long- 
man (London publisher), and advised him to point them out 
to her without mentioning me. He did so. The poor woman 
could not deny that my remarks were just; but she railed 
most bitterly both at the publishers and at the ]\Ir, Nobody 
who had had the insolence to find any blemish in her writ- 
ings . . . but I do not think that she suspects me." A few 
weeks later he writes: "I shall not be at all surprised if 
both you and the public think my paper on Addison a failure, 
but 1 own that I am partial to it. , . . I am truly vexed to 
find Miss Aikin's book so very bad that it is impossible for us, 
with due regard to our own character, to praise it. All I can 
do is to speak civilly of her writings generally, and to express 
regret that she should have been nodding. I have found not 
less than forty gross blunders in the first volume. Of these I 
may perhaps point out eight or ten as courteously as the case 
will bear. Yet it goes much against my feelings to censure 
any woman, even with the greatest lenity. I shall not again 
undertake to review any lady's book till I know how it is 
executed." With this testimony in mind the student will 
readily grant that the introductory paragraphs of the essay 
are quite diplomatic. Macaulay was a bachelor. 



ADDISON. 183 

* Pronounced Tibbals. The country scat of Burleigh, 
Queen Elizabeth's prime minister. 

^ Lace cravats with loose flowing ends. 

" A noted coffee house kept by a former servant of Addi- 
son, a favorite resort of Addison and his friends. Coffee 
houses w ere an important feature of London in Addison's day, 
and exerted a tremendous political influence. Each coffee 
house had its set of patrons, and a man who cared to know 
w^hat was going on went to his coffee house with much the 
same regularity and keenness of interest with which one opens 
his daily paper in these days. Among the noted resorts men- 
tioned in this essay are Will's, frequented by wits; the Gre- 
cian, by scholars; Jonathan's, by merchants; and Garraway's 
by stockbrokers. 

^ A London school for boys. In addition to Addison, the 
school has the honor of having instructed Steele, Blackstone, 
Wesley, Grote, Havelock, and Thackeray. Other schools of 
the same class are Rugby, Eton, and Harrow. 

* The American university idea implies colleges or depart- 
ments of unlike purposes, as the college of law, of medicine, of 
arts, of engineering, etc. The English university consists of 
a group of colleges much alike and under a merely nominal 
central management. Oxford University, as well as Cam- 
bridge, includes a score of colleges not unlike in organization 
and purpose, but occupying separate groups of buildings and 
under independent management. The names of the colleges 
in the oldest two universities are quite similar. Thus, in Ox- 
ford University, and also in Cambridge University, we find a 
Pembroke College, a Corpus Christi College, a Queen's College, 
a Christ's College, a Trinity College, a Jesus College, and a 
Magdalene College (pronounced Maudlin). Some of these col- 
leges have great wealth and records reaching back several 
centuries. All are endowed. The Demies (accent the last 
syllable) of Magdalene College, Oxford, were granted privi- 
leges not unlike those enjoyed by the holders of scholarships 
in American universities. A fellowship, on the other hand, 
was conferred by a college upon its graduate. It entitled him 
to apartments and certain meals, and carried with it a liter- 
ary pension varying in aYnount from $150 to $800 per annum, 



184 MACAULAY'S 

thus enabling a young man to pui'sue his graduate studies at 
his alma mater or abroad. Fellows participated in the gov- 
ernment of the college. We often hear of fellows going down 
posthaste from London to participate in some exciting col- 
lege election. Fellowships were theoretically for life, but 
were usually revoked on the attainment of an independent 
position in a profession, or on marriage, unless continued by 
special vote of the college. 

* No less a personage than Samuel Johnson, with the aid 
of associates, investigated the remarkable case of alleged spirit 
rapping in Cock Lane, and reported that the whole affair was 
an imposture practiced by a young girl. Johnson felt pretty 
sore over the affair and resented any further questioning. 

^° Ireland forged various documents purporting to be in 
Shakespeare's own hand. Among these was a play called Vor- 
tigern, which was actually placed on the stage (1796) before 
the imposture was discovered. 

" The legend is one of some note. The Emperor Marcus 
Aurelius was conducting in person a campaign against the 
Quadi, a German tribe. The Romans were perishing of thirst in 
the heat of summer, when, in answer to the prayers of the 
twelfth legion, composed of Christian soldiers, the cloudless sky 
darkened and a refreshing rain began to fall. While the Ro- 
nians were enjoying this respite, the Quadi suddenly made an 
unexpected attack, and would have cut the Romans to pieces 
but for an extraordinary descent of fire and hail, before which 
the Germans fled in dismay. Some phenomenal storm seems 
without doubt to have occurred. Both the conquered and the 
conquerors believed that it was supernatural. The German 
tribes hastened to sue for peace, and the Roman emperor gave 
his Christian soldiers the name of the " Thundering Legion " 
(174 A.D.). 

^^ Eusebius, one of the early Christian fathers, alleges in 
his church history that in one of the churches of Edessa he 
found a letter in Syriac from Abgarus, ruler of Edessa, to 
Christ; also Christ's reply to Abgarus, Eusebius wrote in 
Greek, and gave a Greek translation of both letters. 

" " An aphorism is a truth pointedly set forth, relating 
rather to speculative principles . . . than to practical matters. 



ADDISON. 185 

and forming a brief and excellent statement of a doctrine; 
thus, ' Maladies are cured by nature, not by remedies.' An 
apothegm, in common matters what an aphorism is in higher, 
is a short, pithy, instructive saying; as, 'Heaven helps those 
who help themselves.' " The one shades into the other. 

^* " And now between the battle lines advances the ardent 
leader of the Pygmies, terrible in majesty and commanding in 
step, who towers above all others like a huge mountain, and 
rises aloft half an arm's length." 

" Sir Roger Newdigate, a Middlesex member of Parliament, 
founded an annual prize at Oxford for the best English verse. 
The Seatonian prize is awarded by Cambridge for the same 
purpose. 

^^ The Kit Cat Club was a convivial association of wits de- 
voted to literature, politics, a good time, and the fortunes of the 
Whig party. Addison became a member on his return from 
the Continent in 1703. One custom characteristic of the club 
w^as that of engraving toasts to famous Whig beauties on the 
drinking glasses. 

" The French Academy, consisting of forty men of letters, 
was organized by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 with a view of 
controlling the usage of words and influencing literary taste. 
The constitution provides, among other duties, for the publi- 
cation of a dictionary of the French language. The latest 
edition is that of 1878. Vacancies are filled by ballot, not al- 
ways, it is thought, with justice. 

^^ " Think not I mean by that to find fault with the Latin 
verses of one of your illustrious academicians which you have 
sent me I have found them very beautiful, worthy of Vida 
and of Sannazar, but not of Horace and of Virgil." 

1" " Why, O muse, dost thou bid me, born of a Sieambrian 
father far this side the Alps, again to lisp in Latin numbers." 

^""Puppet shows and the crane-pygmy battle." 

^^ About one hundred miles south of Venice, on an eastern 
spur of the Apennines, entirely surrounded by Italian terri- 
tory. The little republic is still independent and much as 
Addison found it. Area, 32 square miles; population, 16,000. 

^^ Herculaneum and Pompeii were buried by an eruption of 
Vesuvius, 79 a. d., beneath from seventy to one hundred and 



186 MACAULAY-S 

twelve feet of mud, ashes, and lava. Their rediscovery was 
accidental. Excavations were not begun for several years 
after Addison's visit, so it is quite probable he had no 
thought of these ancient cities. 

^^ As may be readily inferred, Newmarket is noted for 
horse racing. 

-* Lifeguardsman Shaw was an English pugilist who won 
renown at ^Vaterloo, and fell after holding six French guards 
at bay until he had slain four of them. 

^^ " So when an angel by divine command 
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, 
Such as of late o'er pale Britannia pass'd. 
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; 
And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, 
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." 
'^ A portion of Johnson's criticism is given. (See his Lives 
of the English Poets.) " No passage in the Campaign has been 
more often mentioned than the simile of the Angel, which 
is said in the Tatler to be one of the noblest tlioiiglits that 
ever entered into the heart of ma?!, and is therefore worthy of 
attentive consideration. Let it be first inquired Avhether it 
be a simile. A poetical simile is a discovery of likeness between 
two actions in their general nature dissimilar, or of causes ter- 
minating by different operations in some resemblance of effect. 
But the mention of another like consequence from a like 
cause, or of a like performance by a like agency, is not a 
simile, but an exemplification. It is not a simile to say that 
the Thames waters fields, as the Po waters fields; or that as 
Ilecla vomits flames in Iceland so JEtna. vomits flames in 
Sicily. When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his vio- 
lence and rapidity of verse as a river swollen with rain rushes 
from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in 
quest of poetical declarations as the bee wanders to collect 
honey, he in either case produces a simile : the mind is impressed 
with the resemblance of things generally unlike, as unlike as 
intellect and body. . . . Marlborough is so like the Angel in 
the poem that the action of both is almost the same, and per- 
formed by both in tlie same manner. Marlborough teaches 
the battle to rage, the Angel directs the storm; Marlborough 



ADDISON. 18T 

is unmoved in peaceful thought, the Angel is culm and serene; 
Marlborough stands unmoved amidst the shock of hosts, the 
Angel rides calm in the ichirlwind. The lines on Marlborough 
are just and noble, but the simile gives almost the same images 
a second time. But perhaps this thought, though hardly a 
simile, was remote from vulgar conceptions, and required 
great labor of research or dexterity of application. Of this 
Dr. Madden, a name which Ireland ought to honor, once gave 
me his opinion. ' If I had set,' said he, ' ten schoolboys to 
ivrite on the Battle of Blenheim, and eight had brought me 
the Angel, I should not have been surprised.' " 

" For Maeaulay's theory of particularity, see his Essay on 
Milton, page 7. 

^^ Santa Croce has been called the Westminster Abbey of 
Florence. Michael Angelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, and many 
noted Italians rest beneath fine monuments in its nave. 

^^ A street in London at one time inhabited by people of 
social standing. Fashion, however, Avent westward, and the 
locality was abandoned to boarding-house keepers, faring 
much as the region about the British Museum in this respect. 
It was a short walk from the publishing center, and sheltered 
many writers of small incomes who lived by their wits. The 
term became proverbial, so that any writer who wrote for 
immediate return was likely to be called an inhabitant of 
Grub Street. Now called Milton Street. 

'" " Sponging-house. A victualing house or tavern, where 
persons arrested for debt were kept by a bailiff for twenty- 
four hours before being lodged in prison, in order that their 
friends might have an opportunity of settling the debt. 
Sponging-houses were usually the private dwellings of bailiffs, 
and were so named from the extortionate charges made upon 
prisoners for their accommodation therein." — Century Dic- 
tionary. 

^^ A Mr. John Partridge, astrologer, had issued almanacs 
for some thirty years containing such prognostications as 
might aid his sales among the credulous. Swift, under the 
pen name of Isaac Bickerstaff, issued a pamphlet called Pre- 
dictions for the Year 1708, in which he inveighed against false 
predictions, and gave a variety of predictions which might be 
14 



188 MACAULAY'S ADDISON. 

relied upon, including the death of the King of France, and in- 
cidentally stating that Partridge would die March 29th, 
1 1 p. M. As soon as the hour of Partridge's alleged death 
was past. Swift issued a second pamphlet, setting forth cir- 
cumstantially An Account of Partridge's Death in the most 
doleful language imaginable. Partridge was infuriated, and 
issued a pamphlet insisting that he was still alive. Bicker- 
staff replied, comnuserating Partridge on suffering under a 
hallucination, and assuring him that he was really dead. 
Thus a seesaw of pamphlets was kept up for two years, set- 
ting the coffee houses in a roar. Benjamin Franklin, profit- 
ing by the wit of Swift, perpetrated a siinilar joke on a Phila- 
delphia rival. 

^- A gentle rap at Carlyle. 

^^ A band of riotous and profligate young men who went so 
far as to assault evening wayfarers. Finally they rose to such 
a pitch of infamy that they were forced to disband, under 
royal penalty of outlawry. 

" London is divided into several districts. The central 
business portion about the Bank of England and St. Paul's is 
known as the City. 

"^ Iliad, vi, 220-229, Bryant's translation : 
" And let us in the tumult of the fray 
Avoid each other's spears, for there will be 
Of Trojans and of their renowned allies 
Enough for me to slay, whene'er a god 
Shall bring them in my way. In turn for thee 
Are many Greeks to smite, whomever thou 
Canst overcome." 

^^ See Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. 

^^ In a letter to Napier, written a few weeks after this pas- 
sage was written, Macaulay felicitates himself on having 
picked up an old book for a sixpence which fully confirmed his 
view of " Little Dicky." In fact, the suggestion of the essay 
as published in the Review was "'Little Dicky' was evi- 
dently the nickname of some comic actor who played," etc. 
The present positive assertion was substituted in the later re- 
vised edition published in book form. 



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